Updating on My Situation/Sharing My Experience

Hi. I'm 18 and I first posted here about 3 weeks ago in the Introduce Yourself section, which is around when my tinnitus first started (in my right ear). I'd like to give an update and share my experience so far.

When I first went to my GP (which was about 48 hours after onset) they told me to use olive oil eardrops for a week to remove wax in case that was the issue. Unfortunately this made no difference whatsoever. I recently visited my GP again who reported no ear drum perforation and no easily detectable hearing loss from a few basic tests. Now I'm using nasal spray and loratadine, which I am supposed to take for 3 weeks before visiting my GP again and then being referred to an ENT.

Over the first week or so I basically let the condition make me bedridden. I did not want to go outside due to fears of it being too noisy and damaging my ears further. I did not want to do any of my usual activities involving headphones for the same reason. And because I was just feeling so demotivated and distracted by the T, I did not feel like doing anything else either. Also, I started to notice occasional pain in my right ear, which made things even more scary.

However, after about a week of doing practically nothing, I then decided to try to be productive and re-engage with my hobbies again. I'm a programmer so I spend most of my time typing at a computer, and I found myself being able to focus on programming quite well despite the T. That said, the T was still always on my mind and I was always wary about it. I also decided to try using headphones again at low volumes because I use headphones for many things and I did not want the T to take that away from me.

This all went fine for about 1.5 weeks, and despite still being significantly concerned about the T, I was happy about being able to keep doing fun things. Then one day I woke up to T in my left ear too. The T in my left ear seems to be louder but it also seems to be a less annoying tone, at least right now.

Still I am trying to continue being productive and doing fun things, but it is quite difficult. I've dealt with significant depression and anxiety related issues in the past which I've mostly overcome now, so I'm worried that my T could cause these issues to return if it interferes too much.

I'm unsure about what things are safe for me to do and have mostly stopped considering the possibility of the T disappearing, so I'm in a tricky situation and welcome any tips or general thoughts that anyone has.

One last thing I'd like to mention is that I have been thinking about the possible cause of my T (which I'm about 95% sure is too much headphone usage over the years). When thinking about it, I realised that I seem to recall hearing tinnitus very slightly beforehand, but never being able to pinpoint the noise and only hearing it slightly when my ears were blocked in some way (e.g. wearing headphones that cancel out background noise). Therefore I think that my T has been going on for longer than 3 weeks and only just got bad enough for me to notice 3 weeks ago, although I'm not 100% certain.

Thanks for reading.

 

I hope you continue being productive to the point you naturally habituate. Keep your mind busy and going to therapy, exercise, do what you have to do in order to be mentally strong. You got this cheers

 

@teott544
You seem to be in the right track. Keep up the good work!
I'd like to suggest not using headphones. I have severe tinnitus on my left side and fairly mild T on my right. I gave up headphone use a year ago but decided to try them again one day more recently. The following day my right side started acting up for the first time. It scared me to think that the headphones caused further damage. Luckily it returned to it's normal level with a week. For me, lesson learned.
Mike