Something Interesting I Learned About My Father Recently

For my entire life basically, my dad has had some measure of significant hearing loss from occupational noise exposure and recreational(Ironically music and headphones too loud as a lad). Always had to repeat stuff, made sure to speak extra loud to get his attention.

But to my knowledge, he has no T.

I had never seen an audiogram until a few days ago, turns out he's had one yearly for a few decades as part of work. I saw the graph and my jaw dropped. Most of it was 70-90dB of loss beyond the low frequencies.
I thought to myself, I need to buy him some hearing aids. So I looked into stuff, prices of more powerful digital aids and what not. Then sat down the other day to talk to him about it, whether he would wear them if I bought them.

He tells me "No, I don't need them. I can hear fine, it's just the high frequencies I have issues with." At that moment, one of our cats was hitting the bell on our back door. Not a very loud sound. Basically a "let me in plz!" bell. He says "I can even hear the bell ringing on the door there". I tell him I saw the sheet and was amazed he could hear anything at all. He and my mother usually watch TV at around 50-65dbA or so. A bit louder if things are noisy. And he says he can generally hear that fairly well.

I was rather confused at this point, I told him about the numbers and then he says "Those hearing tests are always the same. I do fine until a certain frequency and then it causes my ears to start going off ringing like mad and then i'm done." Basically he can't hear anything once a certain Pure Tone activates some loud ass Tinnitus sound and so the audiogram is likely very inaccurate. He tells me they come in a van and it's not very sound proof. With the headphones on before the testing starts, he can still hear all the stuff going on outside. And that he normally doesn't have any noise in his ears. The Tinnitus usually subsides after a few minutes. But he calls it quits when it happens during an audiogram because he can't hear any tones over the T once it activates.

I thought this was fascinating. Has anyone heard of anyone having T that gets activated by pure tones on a temporary basis but normally doesn't have T but also has a lot of hearing loss?