I made the huge mistake of asking ChatGPT for recovery statistics. Never do that. I'm seven months in after acoustic trauma, and I KNOW I've improved, especially over the last two months. I KNOW there's still plenty of time for me to keep getting better, possibly even to full resolution, or at least to a point where I won't notice it every second of every day. Maybe that will even happen within the next month or two.
I've been asking ChatGPT to share recovery stories, and many of them describe turnaround points between months eight and twelve, sometimes even leading to near silence by month twelve. But I don't know if those stories are real or if ChatGPT is just fabricating them.
Then it asked if I wanted to see recovery statistics from clinical and population studies. I foolishly said yes, and now I'm in full meltdown. The general statistics are not promising at all. In fact, they're terrifying. On the other hand, some studies show that even when people are exposed to extreme sound, such as blasts or cannon fire, the majority still overcome tinnitus, often within a year. If no one ever recovered after sound exposure, wouldn't these boards be overflowing? Wouldn't doctors do more than shrug their shoulders? I don't know what to believe.
Are these studies that show almost no one gets better severely flawed? Are they focused only on the most severe, intractable cases, then applying those results to everyone? Do they separate people who repeatedly injure their ears from those with a single, short-term exposure? When they say that 80 percent report no change in distress levels a year after onset, are they lumping together people with extreme distress and those with little to no distress?
At one point, they said tinnitus was permanent after three months. Then six. Now they say twelve to eighteen. It's so convoluted, confusing, and unclear. Why do some people improve in forty-eight hours or five months, while others linger despite similar or even less severe exposures?
I feel like my life is divided into before and after. One mistake was all it took to decimate everything. Will I ever travel again? Go to a restaurant? Read a book without hearing this chime? Stop feeling like I'm crawling out of my skin every time I drive? Will I ever stop hating myself for what I did to cause this? I keep imagining the life I could have had if I'd made a different decision. The summer I could have enjoyed. I was always careful with my ears, and all it took was fifteen minutes of thoughtlessness to erase that. Why didn't I know better? Why didn't I do better? Will this affect just this year, or the rest of my life?
Doctors haven't helped. I went to two. The first gave me a single dose of Dexamethasone. The second said my ears were fine and told me to wait six to twelve months. Every day feels longer than the one before. I feel like I'm just marking time, waiting for things to improve, but I don't know if they ever will. Am I waiting for something that may never happen? How limited will my life be now?
I know we all share the same fear; the not knowing where healing will ultimately land us or how long it will take. The pain of realizing we could have done something differently and avoided this entirely. And then the terrifying statistics hit us, numbers we don't even know how to interpret. Even when you read the actual studies, it's rarely clear how they selected participants, who exactly was included, other than "people who had tinnitus for more than four weeks," or what conclusions we should draw from the findings, if they're even reliable or statistically significant.
All we can do is wait.
I've been asking ChatGPT to share recovery stories, and many of them describe turnaround points between months eight and twelve, sometimes even leading to near silence by month twelve. But I don't know if those stories are real or if ChatGPT is just fabricating them.
Then it asked if I wanted to see recovery statistics from clinical and population studies. I foolishly said yes, and now I'm in full meltdown. The general statistics are not promising at all. In fact, they're terrifying. On the other hand, some studies show that even when people are exposed to extreme sound, such as blasts or cannon fire, the majority still overcome tinnitus, often within a year. If no one ever recovered after sound exposure, wouldn't these boards be overflowing? Wouldn't doctors do more than shrug their shoulders? I don't know what to believe.
Are these studies that show almost no one gets better severely flawed? Are they focused only on the most severe, intractable cases, then applying those results to everyone? Do they separate people who repeatedly injure their ears from those with a single, short-term exposure? When they say that 80 percent report no change in distress levels a year after onset, are they lumping together people with extreme distress and those with little to no distress?
At one point, they said tinnitus was permanent after three months. Then six. Now they say twelve to eighteen. It's so convoluted, confusing, and unclear. Why do some people improve in forty-eight hours or five months, while others linger despite similar or even less severe exposures?
I feel like my life is divided into before and after. One mistake was all it took to decimate everything. Will I ever travel again? Go to a restaurant? Read a book without hearing this chime? Stop feeling like I'm crawling out of my skin every time I drive? Will I ever stop hating myself for what I did to cause this? I keep imagining the life I could have had if I'd made a different decision. The summer I could have enjoyed. I was always careful with my ears, and all it took was fifteen minutes of thoughtlessness to erase that. Why didn't I know better? Why didn't I do better? Will this affect just this year, or the rest of my life?
Doctors haven't helped. I went to two. The first gave me a single dose of Dexamethasone. The second said my ears were fine and told me to wait six to twelve months. Every day feels longer than the one before. I feel like I'm just marking time, waiting for things to improve, but I don't know if they ever will. Am I waiting for something that may never happen? How limited will my life be now?
I know we all share the same fear; the not knowing where healing will ultimately land us or how long it will take. The pain of realizing we could have done something differently and avoided this entirely. And then the terrifying statistics hit us, numbers we don't even know how to interpret. Even when you read the actual studies, it's rarely clear how they selected participants, who exactly was included, other than "people who had tinnitus for more than four weeks," or what conclusions we should draw from the findings, if they're even reliable or statistically significant.
All we can do is wait.
