What an Amazing Place This Is

Hello everyone,

Well this forum has been so helpful for me I had to stop lurking and make a post.

I am a tinnitus and hyperacusis veteran since I was a kid back in 1988. I had lots of grommets and operations on my ears after many bouts of glue ear and middle ear infections. When I finally got my ears sorted at 10 years old I had very sensitive hearing and pulsate tinnitus as a result of all the treatment. However I did not even know what hyperacusis was until 3 months ago, I had always just assumed that it was normal to be this sensitive to sound or that perhaps I was just a grumpy person who didn't like noise.

So about 3 months ago a new kind of tinnitus hit me while watching Interstellar (just as he went in to the blackhole!) a high pitched whistle started in my left ear. I was drinking cider and I noticed it making me feel a bit dizzy so I stopped drinking it and thought I would get an early night hoping to sleep it off.

Well I didn't sleep it off. I woke up and the tinnitus had turned in to a full on head ringing sensation and my ears were so sensitive to sound I couldn't even have the TV on at the lowest volume or stand the sound of the planes outside. I also had dizziness and migraine, the dizzy spells have now stopped but I still get migraines especially if I raise my voice too loud. Yes, I am even sensitive to my own voice.

I will keep this intro short but I wanted to say that I have been trying Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy which I will report on in due course in the appropriate thread. I have also been trying numerous other treatments suggested on this forum and I hope I can contribute to the body of work here so that anyone else who is suffering can perhaps gain some insight from my experience.

Look forward to getting involved and thank you again for being here. It's a brilliant resource and a great way to raise awareness.

 

Welcome to the forum. Your story is really interesting, to have T & H since a child and being able to live with it without much painful resistance because you think it is normal. This kind of illustrates the fact that the intrusiveness of T (and H in your case) depends on our reaction to them. Sometimes, it is the extreme negative emotions which make it so hard to live with T & H. But of course, now your T & H may kick in another level and you will have to learn how to habituate to the new level. Many members learn to accept their new condition as a 'new normal' and so it is easier to live with it. Hopefully it will subside to your former baseline. I have heard that Interstellar is a very loud movie. Perhaps watching it with some ear protection will be better.

 

Thanks so much for the warm welcome Markku. You've done a great job with this place and I have many of your posts archived in my Evernote folder marked Tinnitus Research. It's not just a good resource though it's also been a great comfort to know I am not alone and that maybe with the help of others like @Danny Boy, who also impresses me greatly, we can help guide researchers and medical professionals with detailed patient reports.

 

It's amazing what the mind can adapt to. But I think in my case it was because I was so young and the symptoms were mild that I just never thought to ask anyone if they could hear their heartbeat too or "does that tannoy announcement not sound insanely loud to anyone else??"

I mostly only heard my T when getting to sleep or upon physical exertion. And I naturally habituated to it by thinking of the pulsing as a soothing uterine sound, imagining myself in a cocoon as I drifted off. I remember this dream very vividly. It would only really be disturbing if I got a cold or flu. In fact now I think about it I also remember the hyperacusis flaring up then too.

As for the hyperacusis it has caused me a lot of irritation. I have spent quite a bit on noise cancelling headphones and ear plugs over the years. If I leave either at home before embarking on a trip I would always go home to get them as if it were really important. Now, I am not sure if this was misophobia or hyperacusis. I might have ended up making my H worse by over protecting my ears all the time as I read that is possible in one of the papers I read.

It's my parents who recently told me that after my last operation at 10 that I was very sensitive to sound, they said I could hear everything and they had to turn the TV down but eventually I must have got over it.

I think these symptoms have been building up gradually over the last few years, there were warning signs but until it got as bad as it is now I never thought to look it up. I hope I am able to get over this latest bout one way or another though right now my anxiety is quite high and I can't see it yet.

 

Hope you will adjust to your H. Dr. Charlie is a member here who is a retired ENT with H too. He seems to live with this condition well for a long time. So you can message him for advise. You can also post your H in the H support forum. It anything, the last resort is Keppra and you can ask @Danny Boy about how Keppra has helped his severe H.