Toilet Lid Noise and Corticosteroids?

Hey all, you’re reading that right. Last night was visiting friends and lifted toilet lid with too much force and boom! Super loud noise - right ear felt full a bit afterwards and now I feel like tinnitus is oscillating more in right ear?

Should I seek corticosteroids ASAP?!

 

Doubt it. Do you think it could have exceeded 120db?

 

Is 120db a threshold?

 

Meditation and relaxation would be far more beneficial. A crying baby can produce up to 130 dB. Unless you ear is severely damaged at the moment, i.e. have damage that would show up on an audio gram (like some one fired a 9mm near your ear a few days ago) that was not there very recently then prednisone would not be safe/smart. There is a reason doctors are so stingy with it! It can do far more damage to your body and immune system. If you are worried take some magnesium and NAC.

 

So when this all started 6 weeks ago there was no acoustic trauma incident. That said even 6 weeks out, do you think steroids could be beneficial?!

 

Phonophobia or H, which often go hand in hand with T (after a while perhaps) make sounds seem much louder than they actually are. Sure, it's a good thing to avoid such events in the future, but especially because they are causing you stress. It is especially the stress of thinking the (probably moderate) noise is causing you damage that is changing things up or your perception of it. Like the posters above have mentioned, there are side-effects to corticosteroids and they should probably not be administered lightly.

Try to relax doing something you enjoy and this will just have been another event in a busy day. Some people with T (and H) work in busy restaurants where people clang plates or cutlery all the time, which in no way causes hearing damage, but may be very annoying at first. When you suffer decreased sound tolerance, you could always look at ways to desensitize the auditory system (which I am also currently trying).

 

Not unless you had SSHL. In that case steroids would be indicated. Hope this puts your mind at ease.

 

If you have been paying any attention to the posts on this forum, you would know that it doesn't have to exceed 120 dB to cause a serious T spike.

It is a sound that would damage the ears of a healthy person. Our ears have been compromised, so this threshold is meaningless to people like us.

I would get steroids, if I were you. I would take them for 2-3 days. And then I would keep the rest to be used in case something like that happens again.

 

Shouldn't you being wearing high grade Peltor muffs when lifting toilet seats?

 

Excuse me @Bill Bauer, that's a bit uncalled for. Where did I mention it might not cause a serious spike? Please point it out, because I can't seem to see it. I asked if the OP thought it could have exceeded 120db. Anything below that is still damn loud and of course can be an issue, however anything over 120db is going to cause instant damage...or 115db or even 100db if you want to be conservative about it. Actual noise related hearing loss depends on two things, sound pressure level vs exposure time. I just don't think a split second a toilet seat noise is going to cause hearing damage, which would necessitate seeking treatment with prednisone/prednisolone.

I have H and have had acoustic incidences leading to chronic ASD with TTTS, from noises a lot lower than that. But nothing that led to permanent hearing damage. So get off your high horse and don't read what you want into others posts. It's really negative and aggressive.

Unless you know what material the seat was made from, the force of the impact and resulting SPL, you cannot possibly know if pred is needed. If there was instant muffled hearing (as opposed to just ear fullness), then I would say take pred.

You know I had an acoustic incident when a balloon popped in my car, just hours after getting a sound tolerance test and tympanogram. That led to INSTANT hearing loss. It turned out to be temporary conductive hearing loss (thankfully!), that I now know is Acoustic Shock Disorder. I took small amounts of prednisolone a few times in following incidences, until I worked out that I did not need it. None of it caused me permanent hearing damage. It did however regress my H and cause my middle ear muscles to become super sensitive (ASD/TTTS). I now know this is what is causing it, you can be sure I won't be running for pred unless I know I need it.

 

I apologize. I thought you were implying that one should not worry about noises below 120 dB. I was wrong to make that post. Too bad we can't delete our posts after 30 minutes...

After a glass plate fell 10 cm onto another glass plate about 30 cm from my ear, T spread to my other ear. I still have it in two ears (although, in that formerly good ear, it got quieter compared to how it was during the first few weeks after that plate incident). I am just saying...

In any case, I would like to apologize. When I wrote that post, I didn't realize who it was that I was responding to.

 

Could you back this statement even one time please? I still don't get why they would be comprised. How is it possible technically?
When I read professionals who wrote about this issue, such as Dr Peignard, they seem to think the exact opposite.

 

It is a fact that some (many?) T sufferers are getting serious spikes as a result of minor noises that healthy people don't even notice. Another way to refer to the fact in the preceding sentence is by saying "our ears have been compromised."

Here is a post that was made 20 minutes ago:

I bet that nobody else at that party had any problems afterwards. If the healthy individuals could easily handle the noise and a T sufferer ended up with a serious problem, wouldn't you say that this seems to imply that his ears had been compromised (even before the party, and as a result his body couldn't handle the party)?

Just because we don't know the details about why it is happening doesn't change the fact that it does happen...

Since there had not been any studies on this topic, those professionals are not basing their statements on any peer-reviewed studies. As a result of this fact, I am going to believe "my lying eyes" even if what I have been seeing is not consistent with what some of those experts are advising.

 

You can generally say the same thing for first sufferers. Will you start claiming that non sufferers' ears have been comprised?

Regarding the temporary spikes, I already told you, but I still don't understand why it would be a sign of a compromised ear or damage.

Yet you have no problem asserting this like it was a truth in every other thread. I find it.. disturbing.

 

Thanks, I appreciate that. I'm sorry if my response was a bit OTT.
Doesn't T spreading to both ears seem to happen quite often anyway, once it becomes centralised in the brain?
When I got it, it was bilateral from the start but nowadays each side does different things at different times.

 

I am asserting it based on what I learned after reading this forum for the past 14.5 months.

I see a difference. If you don't see a difference, we will have to agree to disagree.

I am sorry, but I don't understand what you are saying above. In other words, what is your reply to

That plate incident had happened 9 months after onset. Who knows - it is possible that T would have spread to that ear anyway. But it is strange that that ear managed to be T free for such a long time...

 

One way to see the difference is a thought experiment: suppose half of the concertgoers have T, and half are healthy. Assume that none of them are wearing any hearing protection and that the concert is as loud as concerts can get. A much larger fraction of T sufferers will end up having problems, compared to the fraction of healthy people who will end up becoming "first sufferers."

Compromised - right?!

 

What about the other way around? I also experienced noises that could give serious issues to non sufferers, and they did not affect me.
Why do you always take isolated facts and draw a general conclusion from it? These kind of conclusions should be drawn after studying thousands of comparable cases, not after reading a few threads on a forum that is not even representative of the sufferers population. This is not how it works. Leave science to scientists please.

 

If you say so Bill. Must feel great to be omniscient.

 

The way I see it, some things (e.g., being slowly burned alive, having your T getting louder) are to be avoided at All costs. So, to me, any evidence that a certain activity increases my chance of experiencing that horrible thing indicates that it makes sense to avoid that activity. Those isolated incidents (not so isolated based on the fact that we get to read those horror stories once every 1-7 days or so) are that evidence (I am using Bayesian inference here).

What do you think will happen? Are you saying that there is not going to be any difference? Do you Really believe that?

 

Contrary to you I cannot draw any conclusion from an experiment that has not been carried out.

 

First of all, it might not represent the total population, but it represents the population which all of us here belong to.

I agree that it is better to use a well designed study. But in the absence of such a study, we are to use the information that is available to us.To modify that Donald Rumsfeld's quote: "you don't go to war with the information that you wish to have, you go to war with the information that you have."

Amazing.

In any case, people who really think that our ears can handle as much abuse as the ears of a healthy person, should Not assume that our ears have been compromised. I hope that they end up acting accordingly when deciding whether or not to protect their ears and whether or not to attend loud events.

 

It sounds more like a temporary threshold shift, which can result in cochlear synaptopathy (hidden hearing loss) and possibly tinnitus. A balloon popping is loud enough to cause an acute acoustic trauma if close enough to the ear. It's fortunate that you didn't experience a worsening.

 

No. It’s ASD / TTTS. It is absolutely to do with the tensor tympani muscle and quite probably even the stapedius muscle. It’s now a chronic thing for me, from a number of causes.

 

This is really unsafe/unhealthy advice. There is a reason

Don't misuse Bayesian inference here, especially when your a priori probability is NOT the end result of an accurate deductive reasoning process. This false use of statistics is really not benefiting anyone.

Also, telling everyone to use Prednisone is incredibly irresponsible. The percentage of people who actually suffer from SSHL due to acoustic trauma and would benefit from Prednisone is incredibly small. ENTs prescribe it occasionally because they don't know if that is the case. You want to know why its not Prescribed? Because its terrible. I'm fine with you telling people to take prednisone all the time, but let them know they have a greater chance of getting cancer than preventing (most likely non existent) damage to their ear.

Prednisone use leads to increase risks of cancer. It increase non-hodgkin's lymphoma, squamous cell carcinoma, in fact it's correlated with a 50% increase in basal cell cancer incidence. If someone took prednisone every time you have recommended it on this website, we would have at least one TT sufferer that would actually get cancer from this usage. I have no doubt we will. Just so you know, the chances of TT sufferer getting one of these cancer has increased almost 300 percent, just this year, if prednisone was taken every time you recommended it. Doctors and medical professionals are not idiots, they are making these decisions for a very good reason.

Also the belief that T sufferers ears are weaker and are more susceptible to noise, outside of the acute incidence of injury, is unproven rubbish.

Ok...end rant.

 

Would you have a source for that?

Because my searches seem to indicate that prednisone is a drug that is used to TREAT cancer.
https://www.cancercenter.com/cancer-drugs/prednisone/

For more details, see: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?start=0&q=prednisone+cancer

LOL Are you sure it is not 304.67 percent?

I have to leave for work now. But I will be back.

 

@Bill Bauer I’m glad you can search google, but clearly not well enough. I need to get back to my job. Oh wait, luckily this intersects with it nicely as I am a cancer research scientist. I was going to give you a source but I feel likes it’s pointless. Radiation treats cancer, it also causes it. That should explain it well enough for you. Just insert prednisone. That’s why people don’t have CT scans all the time. This really shouldn’t be rocket science...

 

If you are a cancer research scientist, how could you make a statement saying that the probability of one of the readers here getting cancer had increased by 300%? Given how uncertain all of this is (how many people would read my posts, how many would decide to get prednisone, how many will actually be able to get their hands on prednisone, the dosage that they will be taking, the number of days they will take it for, etc.) not a very scientific statement, right?

I just asked for a source, I didn't say that prednisone doesn't cause cancer. I couldn't see anything about it among the first 50 or so results on Google Scholar. Since I am potentially going to be taking more prednisone in the future, being able to see the study (studies?) linking it to cancer would certainly be helpful.

 

Unproven or disproven? Is there scientific evidence either way?

 

Un-. If it was disproven I'm sure we would have seen a google scholar post by now