The "What If..." Thread

I'm not sure it's productive to think about the "what ifs" - it obviously leads to a better outcome, so all you're going to do is fuel the denial power in you.
It doesn't really matter "what if": it's there, you can't change the past. Now look at the future and for ways to make it more comfortable for you. That means looking for cures, coping techniques, or whatever else you feel would help you (these are not mutually exclusive: I look for cures and coping techniques all the time).

 

A shotgun next to someone's head? That's messed up.
Does your uncle have severe or at least bothersome T?

The thing is, it was a legitimate accident. Although I think he was pretty damn negligent... just being an idiot, but not intentional. It's funny how idiots are always harming other people instead of themselves.

If you were to intentionally do it to someone, you could face getting sued and assault charges. You can wreck someone's life and get off with zero repercussions if it's a work accident. It's impossible to even sue the person that injured you because of shitty workers compensation laws.

There is nothing I can do about it.

 

Gun next to the ear is seriously messed up, but I'm really glad to hear the spike settled down. Out of curiosity did you go to a doctor or take anything after the incident, or did the T resolve on its own? Also, how bad was the T spike and how bad was your T before the gun incident?

 

His T is bothersome but it wasn't always like that,after the shotgun incident as a kid he was left with mild T for nearly 40 years of his life.
4 years ago he passed out and fell off of his bicycle during a charity event,pulled his neck and hit his head against the ground and his T has been louder ever since.
Doctors told him it was due to high blood pressure,well at least the blackout was so he has since got his blood pressure under control but the higher T remains.He got his neck aligned and it also made no difference to his T,brain scans show no head trauma so he reckons the fall damaged his hearing in some way.His hearing thresholds remain the same so an audiologist diagnosed it as"auditory nerve irritation"and told him it would settle in time,4 years later and it hasn't.

 

The shotgun was next to my uncles ear,the gun that was fired next to mine was only a toy gun that made a little pop sound it wasn't loud but just sudden.

The spike dropped back after a day or so to its regular low hiss.

 

I hope you never talked to that guy again. I would have beaten that guy until he needed medical assistance. Not one to promote violence but doing that AFTER you told them how you felt and how dangerous it might be.. Oh lord, I would have murdered him and fed him to pigs.

 

Tell us when you are ready
I understand how you feel, sometimes it does help to talk about it even if it hurts. Putting words in how you feel can be a relief, but only if you feel you want/are ready to. No pressure! Hope you feel better!

 

I have to agree with @Fangen.. Oh My...

 

God this makes me angry.

 

I can honestly say I haven't spoken to him since,he's a dumbass that my friends are friends with if you get me?After I punched him I'm pretty sure any chances of a healthy friendship went straight out the window lol.

 

Well he basically shot you in the head!

 

@bill112 glad you knocked him on his ass

 

Thanks, @Fangen.

The thing is, I don't even know if what I think is the cause of my T and H is indeed really the cause of my T and H. And I may never know. So since getting these horrid conditions, I've been blaming myself every single day. I'm tired of being hard on myself but it's hard to stop.

The emotional/mental toll of T and H is far worse than the physical toll. Reading the stories here, I think many will gladly trade places with me. And from an objective point of view, I can see that my case is milder, even with H thrown in. But my mind holds me in its prison and that's what makes life so difficult for me now.

T and H can get better, or they can get worse. If they do get worse, I don't want to look back to today years from now and regret not making the most out of my good days. Yet, even knowing that, I'm still stuck and can't move forward. But I'm trying! I really am. Baby steps. I want to be kinder to myself.

 

I am still going trough my what if... Phase.

I know it's a waste of energy and time. But eventually it will pass.

I just can't help thinking."what if I had taken a break.. What if I had continued tomorrow, what if what if..."

Useless. Completely pointless, but it will go away..

 

It's counter productive. It's also something that can be applied to all bad and GOOD things in your life. You wouldn't want to undo those, would you?

That with which we are, we are.

 

Leqi, did you have a perforated eardrum? Doctors argue that ear drops can't cause tinnitus unless a patient has that but I am not so sure, I did refuse to use those drops once and used acetic acid spray instead. I wonder if there could be microtears in the eardrum that could potentially enable that ototoxic antibiotic to reach the middle ear in some cases.

I never used to play what if with health issues but I find myself doing it every day lately. It is not healthy. We tend to regret the decisions we see as poorly thought out ones that could easily have gone another way.

 

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable hypothesis. Even a healthy ear drum seems to have some level of porosity: I remember somebody in here posting about new tech that is being developed that tries to "push" some drug through the ear drum (perhaps via magnetic fields, IIRC), and I imagine this wouldn't work at all if it was hermetically sealed.

However, like anything, size matters: if some amount of compound was able to make it through micro tears, there is a high chance that this compounds settles on the other side of the drum, through simple capillarity. It would require a lot of material to start a post-traversal bundle big enough that it can travel to the other side of the middle ear to the round/oval windows. Perhaps that's the challenge that this new tech is trying to solve by assisting with magnetic fields.

 

110% agree there!!!!!!!!!!

 

But, for many people, it's a game/life changer so the what if is important in terms of changes/decisions you wished you could have made in order to go down a different path that doesn't result in t and/or whatever you have now.

It might be pointless but we still do it. I do it.

 

Yes. It's true. It's sometimes a bit like a nightmare that you can't wake up from.

It's not productive though.

I often thought about Kevin Ogar, both before and after getting T. He was a Crossfitter that had a severe accident during a competition that ended up completely severing his spine and making him a paraplegic.

On competition day, he did everything right. He did a snatch and bailed on the lift in the correct way. That is to say, he snatched the weight over head and when he couldn't quite stabilise himself, he jumped forward and bailed the weight behind him. This is the correct way to do it.

Only, it turned out to be catastrophic.

Due to the ineptitude of the organisers, they had stacks of weights behind him. The barbell fell on the weights, ricochet and hit him in the spine, changing his life forever.

The doctors told him if the barbell had hit him inches above, below or to the side, he could have been killed or he could've been fine. He was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery and slowly managed to create a new life for himself. He's now competing as a paraplegic bench presser and is hoping to represent the US in the Special Olympics.

Imagine how horrific it would have been for him to think about how things could have gone differently. An inch here, an inch there, he could've been fine. Hell, what if he'd had some sort of stomach bug and didn't compete? There must've been thousands of scenarios running through his head. The consequences of that one day in 2014 were severe.

Kevin Ogar - Laughing at Adversity, Then...

Still, we can't go back and change anything. Life must be lived looking forward. That's not going to be easy for some. There's little in the way of actual treatments for tinnitus that have been proven to work. Every person will have a different path to acceptance of what has happened to them.

But one thing that doesn't help is looking backwards at what could have been. It didn't turn out that way. We have to accept what has happened and try to move towards a new life, with the hope that treatments like Neuromod, FX-322 and so on can help us. Most of us are not researchers in the field, so the best thing for us to do is to donate time and effort to the likes of TT and research. Memento mori. That means "remember you are mortal". You are going to die one day - whether you have T or not. Don't waste any more time than you already have dwelling on the past when the present is all you can change.