Tinnitus from Age 12 — This Summer I Went from One Tinnitus Tone to Five Tones

Hi all.

Long time lurker, first time poster. I just HAD to come out with my story NOW!

First off: THANK you community - you guys/girls really keep the hope going, and makes me fell like I'm not alone! I really mean that.

Second - English is not my mother tongue (although I love the language), so I apologize for spelling mistakes.

Okay... So:

I've had in-head tinnitus since I was 12.

This summer, three things happened.

1) I work as a teacher in Denmark. All children returned to school just before the summer vacation - and in that time, being at work was LOUD!!! The children hadn't seen each other for a long time, and summer vacation was just around the corner.

2) I fell and hit the back of my head into concrete.

3) I had my COVID-19 vaccine.

Whatever the cause, I went from 1 middle-head tone, to 3 tones in the left ear and 1 in the right ear (plus the one in the middle of my head).

Now, question 1:
When I've had a shower, my tinnitus just rise to absurd levels - anyone else experienced that? And what in the world is the solution? It's not like i just can stop taking showers...

Okay, this post is getting long. Dear reader, I hope I still have your attention.

Tinnitus sufferers with small children... I'm... just seeking advice. How do you handle your child crying/screaming in your worst ear? I know it's a paradoxical question - because, of course you cannot avoid that. But still... maybe someone has a good advice?

And the last thing - if any other teachers out there have tinnitus - I recommend in-ear noise cancelling earbuds. I will say to you: it is a blessing to be able to cancel the noise when the children get to loud!!

I wish my fellow tinnitus sufferers a good day/night.
Currently clinging to my comfort - whisky and mead (a Danish viking after all ).

 

How soon after the vaccine did this happen?

 

Find yourself a foam earplugs brand that is soft on the ear, and make a habit of carrying them during the relevant parts of the day. I recommend Moldex spark plugs for this purpose.

 

Quite soon. A few days I guess.

 

Hello.

So I have a 7/10 tinnitus.

But I get 2-5 crippling spikes each day, when my tinnitus rises to 10/10. They only last 5-10 seconds, but that is more than enough!

Just as i started to habituate to my "normal" tinnitus - but this gives me sweaty palms and cold sweat.

Is anyone else experiencing this? And what have you done about it?

 

Contemplating suicide.

 

You’re contemplating suicide and you’re telling me Valium that helps me keep my job is dangerous?

 

Correct! It’s why I’m contemplating it. The benzodiazepines destroyed my ears along with Pfizer vaccine.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

 

How is your post helpful? I’m doing everything I can. I’m going to be part of an extensive tinnitus program at a research university. I employ every technique I can to manage the tinnitus. You seem to think like I view Valium as a cure or the only thing to try. I have had an emergency Valium prescription for lung squeezing back spasms that send me to the ER. I am very familiar with Valium. Due to my anxieties, it helps calm the spikes. I just need to be able to control the spikes to keep my job. Spikes that have me firmly on the road to unemployment. What else do you suggest then?

I should add that I am very familiar with Valium. I have had an emergency prescription for lung squeezing back spasms that send me to the ER. I don’t want people to think I see Valium as the cure or the only thing to try. It’s just that due to my anxieties, it helps calm the spikes. I just need to be able to control the spikes to keep my job. If I can’t do that, then goodbye livelihood, goodbye research hearing program. I wouldn’t be posting this if it weren’t very well thought out and I weren’t in serious need of help.

 

You’re trying what you can, he just gave up and rains on everyone’s parade lol.

 

Are these spikes accompanied by a feeling of muffled hearing? A sensation of hearing that "drops" and then slowly comes back? If so, you are probably experiencing episodes of fleeting tinnitus. It seems to be very common, even though, surprise surprise, the medical community has no idea about why this phenomenon happens.

 

5-10 seconds is just fleeting tinnitus.

We all have it <3

 

Except you also have Ménière’s Disease, Brian. Which notoriously causes tinnitus and gets worse as time goes on. Have you considered that perhaps quite likely that medication and the vaccine actually didn’t cause your tinnitus to worsen and perhaps your tinnitus is worsening due to your Ménière’s disease?

Many people take benzodiazepines for a period of time as well as other medications and do not have a bad reaction. I also saw a recent interview where an immunologist said that if the vaccine is going to cause tinnitus it’s going to be about two weeks after your injection because it takes that long for your immune system to respond to an antigen. He’s quite skeptical of reports of tinnitus being caused by vaccine when it’s within hours or a couple of days of the vaccine.

Lastly, I don’t think it’s helpful when somebody is reaching out for support for you to tell them that you’re going to harm yourself. There are other venues for you to work that out particularly in therapy. While I completely feel for you and understand your level of despair, the point of this thread is to help people who are reaching out and looking for support.

 

Ménière’s was so mild I had no idea I even had it until I was diagnosed after the vaccine. Obviously I know Ménière’s causes tinnitus.

2 weeks after shot number 1 I felt a ring and it seemed to go away. Stupidly I got shot 2 and 36 hours after that I got ringing and whole slew of other neurological symptoms which are beyond the scope of Tinnitus Talk.

Tapering benzodiazepines is known to cause tinnitus. If I had known that to begin with I would have never started them. I am trying to warn people not to fall into the trap I did! If they still want to tempt fate it’s their life.

 

My wife has it. My friend was telling me it happens to him too. I believe everyone has fleeting tinnitus. It’s just scary when your tinnitus is already loud.

 

I’m very sorry you’re hurting. I hate that I didn’t say this earlier but you should not take your own life. You shouldn’t even contemplate it. It doesn’t help. If you’re like me, those thoughts just make things worse. And this is not coming from someone naive about suffering. I have attempted suicide before. Many times. Please please get help. There are support groups dedicated to suicide prevention. I don’t know how helpful this forum is to address suicide prevention. Honestly it’s shocking how moderators will allow some posts about suicide.

 

Hmm many people have it. But I can’t recall having it before my trauma. I remember having the flu and the nose stuffed so could get some ringing until the pressure equalised but no loud fleeting tinnitus. But my sister and mum get it sometimes.

 

I would clarify that tapering Benzos too quickly causes tinnitus.

 

My guess is that fleeting tinnitus is early trauma. Modern life is very noisy and it's very likely that everybody gets damages. Now that everybody has it they call it normal.

I have had tinnitus for a long time and I got at least 3 times more fleeting tinnitus on my 'worst ear' regarding chronic tinnitus.

Since the worsening my 'good ear' now has as much fleeting tinnitus than the other, and in the first months I sometimes could trigger it by scratching the hairs on top of my head.

 

I was on for 6 weeks, tapered 9 weeks, still got tinnitus worsened. Even crossed over to Valium to help taper. Same result. Wish I didn’t touch it. Now really can’t function.

 

Well damn, I have a bit of them now.

 

Oh I remember reading your post about that. You must be super sensitive. That really stinks. I’m sorry.

 

I'm really sorry to hear this, and I believe you because in another life I admin a benzo withdrawal board and I know how ugly outlier cases are.

This is extremely uncommon, though. I once did a followup with a huge list of people that had reported tinnitus from benzo withdrawal as their most severe symptom; more than half of people had recovered completely, and the other half generally said their tinnitus was extremely mild. The longest recovery time I remember was someone who took 2-3 years to baseline out, but that is someone who had used a lot of benzos for a long time.

I don't like benzos and think they're dangerous, but they give me a subjectively better quality of life, and I've tapered from them twice (both ugly, 12-14 month long affairs) including once after my tinnitus got bad from noise in 2010, and I don't think it had any long term impact on my ears.

Taking it also isn't a magic bullet and it seems to need to be combined with gabapentin to be effective against the real high frequency blaring EEEeeEEE stuff, and perhaps there is a price to be paid later, but I've been back on daily benzos since 2017 and for the past 4 years my quality of life and ability to focus on my kids / wife / job have been much better than they were 2010-2016.

There are certainly other things to explore; for instance, if you haven't tried flumazenil infusions, that might be worth looking at.

Usually by wincing and cursing to myself

When they are big enough to reason with you can try to make them remember that dad's ears are rough and hey maybe don't bang on a snare drum right by my head, but when they're real small all you can do is wear earplugs a lot. My wife doesn't have tinnitus but does have misophonia and between the two of us there's hearing protection of some kind scattered through the house.

 

Thanks for the info. I’m so broken now.

 

I’ve been off benzodiazepines about 5 weeks now. I had a huge spike from the vaccine that is still ongoing after having mild tinnitus for about 3 years due to Ménière’s, a disease I didn’t even know I had. I’m a complete mess. I also forgot to mention I have reactive tinnitus since the vaccine or hyperacusis whatever you want to call it. It’s maddening!

What do benzodiazepines do to damage the ear? I don’t get this.

 

Very sorry to hear, that all sucks; you're also pretty early in, all things considered (both from a vaxx and benzo standpoint). For what it's worth, both pfizer shots spiked my tinnitus, #2 worse than #1, I think I was back to my baseline by ~4 weeks (and I am planning on boosting next month). I have a specific protocol for taking vaccines and other immunologic shit that I know is going to be generally inflammatory to my body, and I don't love any of it, but my read of the science is that I'm a lot more likely to have my ears get destroyed by breakthrough COVID than by a vaxx, so I will do another booster.

Nothing directly. Outside of severe, acute withdrawal that's so severe it causes bloodflow problems to the ear from muscle constriction, but as far as I can tell that's very uncommon.

What benzos do, for sure, is disrupt the balance of GABA, a calming neurotransmitter, and various other hormones/neurotransmitters, in ways that reliably mess with sensory input and fear perception in a vicious cycle. Once the tinnitus percept is identified as being "wrong" and "scary", this becomes an (unconscious) fixation of the limbic system which exists to keep us aware of threats.

There's a shitton of science to this I kind of understand but am not qualified to really speak to because my background is touching keyboards to light up servers on the internet, but the short version is "benzos directly and chemically interact with the fight-or-flight adrenaline response and the upshot of this is that toxic stimuli like tinnitus are literally amplified by the perceptual system".

I can send you like three dozen research papers if you want, but, they won't be very useful. If you don't want to just keep popping pills you need to give yourself time to heal, and my best advice there is "find things you find neutral to calming and fill your free time with them, also try hard to cultivate some kind of regular practice around meditation / yoga / exercise". For me meditation and yoga were more useful than exercise but I think exercise done correctly is just a form of body-based meditation, and more or less anything that brings our focus into other parts of our body can be useful in unwinding some of the panic response to tinnitus.

Note that I said "unwinding the panic response", not "fixing the tinnitus". The two things are very different, my experience is that the first has been somewhat possible and I still haven't figured out a way to do the second, except for experimental science that was only available to me briefly during a research study.

 

Sadly there’s no way to fix the tinnitus. I don’t know if the vaccine damage is permanent or if benzo damage is permanent. it’s a shot in the dark. I’m unable to work right now and I refuse to pop more pills. This crap is pure torture with no end in sight.

I can’t really do too much because I am extremely sensitive to noise. It spikes the tinnitus to otherworldly levels and literally makes me cry! I’m a 39 year old man btw. I never had any depression or mental health issues until now.

 

Just checking back in - to say THANK you to you all, for replying/talking/discussing here.

It helps an insane amount! Thank you!

 

How long does it usually take for the benzo tinnitus to go away?

 

Try and stay positive. Things will improve!