Debrox + Musicals = Hyperacusis x Tinnitus

I’m writing this to give a full context of where I’m at and how I got here. Maybe it’s also a vent, I dunno. TL;DR at the bottom.

I. The Beginning

One morning at the beginning of June 2023, I wake up with my left ear blocked up. The feeling comes and goes, but to me it seems like a sign that I should clean my ear. I use Debrox that night, then twice a day for the next few days. I add one more dose on one extra day because my ear still feels weird. I syringe extra hard. Either one of those things might’ve screwed me.

Still feeling weird, I go to the Minute Clinic nearby to get a professional to look at it. She says my left ear looks red and irritated, but no wax. She offers to syringe my other ear instead, and I accept. I figure the weird feeling will go away eventually.

It continues feeling kind of weird but bearable for the next few weeks. I go out with friends to the beach; I game; I listen to music. Then comes Father’s Day weekend. I bought tickets to the first day of previews for a Broadway musical, so we go into the city and watch. Our seats are right next to the speakers, with a great view of the stage. It’s loud, but doesn’t affect me much at the time.

(I later found out that, once this musical officially premiered, they started handing out earplugs to guests. That’s what I get for attending the previews, I guess. We were their guinea pigs.)

The next night, I have a hard time sleeping. There’s a fluttering/thumping in my left/bad ear that won’t go away. It feels like a physical sensation, not just a noise. In my panic, I google my symptoms and am terrified of what I find. I immediately schedule an appointment with my local ENT, for the following Monday. I have a hard time sleeping after that.

II. The Road to a Diagnosis

Monday morning rolls around. I sit in the waiting room for over an hour, only for the doctor to look at me for 1 minute and tell me my ear is fine and it’s probably nothing. She says I should schedule an appointment for a hearing test if I really want to, but for whatever reason, the nurse who was standing right there when the doctor told me this looks at me and says, “You don’t need a followup appointment. Right?” Feeling dismissed, I shrug and say no thanks.

Later, I did end up making a followup appointment for a hearing test, but the audiologist wasn’t available for another 3 weeks. Well shit.

As the week goes on, it doesn’t get better. I lose sleep. I start becoming hyper aware of everything my body does; I convince myself I have a UTI, that I have heart problems, etc. This culminates in me becoming bedridden with a fever over 101F. I see another Minute Clinic doctor for the supposed UTI and an Urgent Care doctor for the fever. I get Macrobid for the UTI. The Urgent Care doctor looks in my ear and thinks I have a perforated eardrum, so he prescribes antibiotics to ensure I don’t get an infection while I heal. He also suggests I see an ENT for a followup.

For a week, I feel immense relief. Both physically and mentally. I start putting my games on mute and sleeping on my good ear because I heard that it is good for perforated eardrums. I actually wake up one morning and feel the thumping stop. It turns into the staticky hiss of tinnitus, which is more familiar to me and far more tolerable than the thumping at this point. I feel relaxed. Perforations heal. I’m on antibiotics. I’ll be fine.**

I eventually see another ENT at the same practice - this time someone older with more experience. I get weird looks from people wondering why I didn’t follow up with the first ENT, but I ignore them. I’m just here to check if my perforation is healing, I tell him. He says okay. But I don’t have a perforation.

He explains that my outer and middle ear look fine, and he can’t give me any further information until he gets a hearing test. Which means I have to wait. Again.

I tell him all the other things - maybe it was the Debrox, maybe it was the syringing - but he denies all that and says that’s impossible. He suggests it might be hyperacusis or a tumor. For some reason I think he thought that would comfort me.

The next few days before my hearing test, my mental and physical condition spirals. I lose my appetite. I lose sleep. I start physically cringing when my friends and family talk too loud. I sob uncontrollably more than once.

Finally, the day of the hearing test comes. It doesn’t hurt me, but it does make my middle ear act up. Neither the audiologist nor the ENT bring that up to me. Instead, they tell me I have super good hearing - what they call hyperacusis. The ENT tells me I just have to live with it.

Can I go back to normal? No.

Can I adjust to it? Yes, eventually.

Is this because of the earwax cleaning? Was the earwax providing protection? Maybe.

Will I go back to normal once the earwax builds back up? Maybe.

(This earwax theory was all bullshit. I know it was my idea, but come on, at least be honest with me.)

Should I start wearing earplugs? Sure, why not.

At this point, I was simply relieved to hear this could be temporary and left feeling elated, even though it was total BS if you thought about it for more than a second. Why was it only happening in one ear? Why didn’t he provide any kind of actionable advice? Why would this start happening now if my ears have supposedly been this good my whole life?

But I followed the doctor’s orders. I stopped caring. I tried to move on.

It sinks in maybe a day later that the news wasn’t really good news. Another day after that, I wake up to burning pain in my bad ear, in reaction to the rain hitting my window pretty hard. It stops immediately after the rain stops. I get the same thing standing next to the microwave in the kitchen.

It hits me, then, that this condition isn’t stable. It’s getting worse.

** I mention this part specifically because this inadvertently probably stopped me from getting much worse. The antibiotics might’ve done nothing, but cutting down on digital audio most likely helped.

III. And Now...

It is now late August and I guess I’m doing better than before, but as you can imagine the improvement isn’t gigantic. Here’s the rundown of my current symptoms:

• TTTS: This happens in reaction to things like plates and silverware, sometimes the shower. Usually it only happens when I’m exposed to the noise, but if I experience this fluttering too many times in a day, it flutters like crazy when I try to sleep at night. Sometimes the flutter will linger even through to the next morning, but usually it goes away by the afternoon if I isolate and protect. Plugging my ear seems to calm it down, too.
  
  
• Slight pain and discomfort: I would describe this as mostly sharp stabbing pains that come and go. Usually the stabbing pains happen with seemingly no trigger in silence; I suspect they are a delayed reaction. They usually don’t last longer than a minute max at a time. Burning pains here and there - like my ears feel “strained” or “tired.” I no longer get pain in reaction to rain or the microwave, but I usually wear protection in the kitchen anyway.
  
  
• Palinacousis: My tinnitus seems to copy the background noises around me, like crickets, my shower, my PC’s coil whine. It gets louder when I use earplugs for a long time.
  
  
• TMJ: It’s a pretty minor case all things considered, but I do have the classic jaw clicking and jaw pain when chewing something crunchy.

I’m currently doing a lot of stuff to help treat my condition (supplements, physical therapy, etc.), but the main thing that has helped is working from home with no digital audio and using earplugs when I leave my room (and sometimes when I sleep; I still have no idea if my snoring makes my hyperacusis worse). It’s really hard to say at this point if I have noxacusis or just moderate/severe loudness hyperacusis, but I’m erring on the side of caution for now.

To be honest, I’m actually going through what I suspect to be my first setback. Just this morning, my TTTS started reacting to quieter noises than before - like my pillow, a distant plane flying overhead, typing on a keyboard. It seemed to get a little better as the day went on, but I’m a little worried because I have a couple appointments coming up this week, so I can’t isolate and rest as much as I’d like to. I’ve already canceled a few appointments but I still have two more I can’t miss, on back to back days. Really just the worst timing, ugh...

Anyway, the promised TL;DR:

TL;DR: I got hyperacusis from a combination of ear syringing and a loud musical. Currently dealing with TMJ, TTTS, tinnitus, slight pain hyperacusis and loudness hyperacusis. Hello!

 

I am sorry. Welcome to the nightmare that some woke up from, at least to a great degree. I am still hoping I will, too. And so you should.