Tinnitus Worsened After a Vacation and Long Flights

Hi! For the last 10 days I have been on holidays. Unfortunately, what was supposed to be helping me relaxing from tinnitus made it worse

I had to take a long flight (and one back home of course) and thanks to the several suggestions I found on this forum I could minimise any side effect. I used airplane earplugs during ascend and descend phases, a nasal decongestionant and a combination of foam earplugs, earmuff and noise canceling headphones. I just noticed that my left ear had some troubles equalising the pressure during descend even though I forced the eustachian tubes to be open by chewing, yawning, swallowing and gently performing Valsalva maneuver. The left ear stayed a bit clogged for few hours after the flights but then it popped by itself.

The real problem instead is T which spiked one night after I have been exposed to moderate noise (city centre noise) for a couple of hours even though i was wearing protection. According to the app on my phone the noise was around 75db. The spike was pretty bad as I wake up in the middle of the night having also dizziness and nausea as side effect which stay for the next day as well. H increased a lot as well after I was gradually getting better from it. The spike did not subside for the whole holidays and in addition to that yesterday night, after being returned home, T spiked even more. I can ear a new tone in the right ear (which was supposed to be the good ear) with a feeling of fullness too.

I had some spikes in the last few months, but it was basically the same tone higher in loudness. I have not experienced new tones in a spike and I am sure that the fear of a new damage is not helping at all. I hate the unpredictability of T! After sleeping after the long flight I woke up and I was feeling really good and T was much less than normal! Perhaps the happiness of being on holidays was stronger than T itself...

I am not sure if I am clearly doing something wrong with the way I handle T but it seems that every time I try to get back with my normal life I make it worse. On the contrary, if I live like an eremite, avoiding any potential danger situation, I get depressed and I perceive T more.

 

In order to improve the mood of the forum an update on my situation...
After a week of intense ear fullness and pain I woke up one morning with T volume cut down in the half. Not sure what happened, I just went back with my "healthy life" routine, taking vitamins and NAC. I also went to an ENT which confirmed no further ear damage and ensured my eustachian tubes were in a good shape.
Currently I am going through a different spike caused by a weeding (wearing foam earplugs) and the symptoms are the same so far. Hopefully the outcome will be the same...

 

Hello,

This is great if the T went down again after a few days... Apparently if you take vacations your body doesn't accept it... :lol:

Do you have Hyperacousis too ?

Take care !

Christophe

 

Hi @Christophe_85 , I guess my T does not like the change of the normal sound environment around me. I live and work in a quiet and calm norwegian city following the same routine (work - exercise/swimming pool/hiking - home) and keeping the noise around me (and my stress level) quiet. I push myself to go out at night from time to time (and never for too long) but I never stepped yet into a club or a concert. Going on holidays it's a different story. I'm from small village in Italy, 1/5 of the size of the city where a live, but maybe 3 times more noisy...cars, motorcycles, ambulances running all day long. And also I don't have much control over people around me including friends and family. So it is really easy to get a person shouting next to me or closing a door just too hard. Hence the spikes...

Yes I do. It gets worse during these spiking period, specially against high frequency sounds. When I was in Japan I literally had to run away from a shop where there were a lot of crappy video monitors because I could feel their radiation waves sounds.

 

Yes unfortunatly H does come around with T...

I have the same, the combination of T AND H !

 

This was my answer to the 1st paragraph :

"Yes T can be quite stressed by many things...
Ah it looks very good ! And great if your work is not loud !
So you do some Sport how many times per week ?

And how did you get your T ? I read Acoustic Trauma...

Regarding Italy, southern countries are much louder in general... "

 

I got T from an indoor concert. Unfortunately at that time I knew nothing about ear damage and T so I did not wear any ear protection.

I try to do a bit of exercise every day, also because I spend 8 hours a day sit at my job. I don't push it too hard and I found that swimming is the sport that gives me more relief.

And yes, Italy can be very noisy, but I really started noticing it only after I got T

 

@supernovae Me too! I don't think I could function without it! It's good to have something that we can do that takes the stress out of this a bit....