Success with Medrol

Hey all,

Just wanted to share my story to help anyone in the early stages of tinnitus. My problems began in summer of 2015 after scuba diving (at least this is the only thing I can think to attribute it to). The diving went fine but the week after I returned home I got a very painful infection in my left ear. Did the whole antibiotic regimen which got rid of the infection but ever since then, my left ear never felt 100% right. Like it needed to pop just a little more. Never had any muffled hearing or the echoing sound, I could just tell it wasn't perfect.

Over the next year and a half, I put off going to an ENT because the ear would only bother me every now and then...most of the time I didn't notice it. About 6 months ago when I went in for an annual check up, I mentioned the ear to the doc and he said it was slightly retracted and to just drink a lot of water and use flonase. Did all that and didn't notice a difference.

About 3 weeks ago I noticed my ear felt very full with pressure and began to hurt, and that's when the ringing started (very high pitched, like a dog whistle. But not incredibly loud. I only lost sleep the first two nights). So the next day I made the appointment to go to the ENT. Two days later my ear felt like it was going to explode so I went to urgent care where the doctor did confirm that my ear had lots of pressure and put me on three days of Prednisone. Luckily my ENT appointment was scheduled for the day after the Prednisone ended. The Prednisone did help the ear pain and helped slightly with the ringing. At the ENT, hearing tested excellent. Doc put me on a tapering dose of Medrol for 6 days and told me to use Afrin once a day for 3 days.

I have been done with the Medrol for 4 days now and my ear feels great. I can still tell it isn't 100% but no discomfort at all. The ringing also went away. The ringing may come back a few times a day but it is very faint and goes away pretty quickly. I've been slowly reintroducing coffee and the occasional beer back into my week to see how that effects it. So far, one coffee in the morning doesn't seem to do too much, if anything, to the ringing.

I know I'm only a few days off the meds and the tinnitus very well may come back at any time, but I'm pretty confident that it was directly related to some sort of ETD and if that's under control, so is the T. The steroids make you feel like crap while you're on them but seem to be very helpful if the T isn't noise induced.