- Jul 20, 2017
- 38
- Tinnitus Since
- 11/2016
- Cause of Tinnitus
- Noise Trauma ~ Wedding Reception
Hey everyone, so I've been a long time lurker of this forum (and pretty much the entire internet), after the onset of my T and H on November 12th, 2016. I promised myself I'd post a success story, but turns out that day hasn't come yet, and I'm feeling pretty depressed / in need of a support group to deal with this. These past 8.75 months (I like to keep it at 8.5 in my head, although this Saturday will be 9 months 
) have been a long, torturous, isolating road. I know all of you can relate, which is why I'm posting here, because nobody else in my life understands this at all. I can't really blame them though, because if my ears were still in perfect shape, as they were before my noise trauma, I probably wouldn't understand what this is like either. Before this, I didn't even know that H existed, and all the other bizarre symptoms that go with it. I knew about T, but never knew how intrusive it is, or fathomed that the ears could be damaged in this way.
On that haunting day in November, I went to a wedding reception of my sister's friend, who I've known since childhood. I'm 30 now, and for most of my young adult life, I've always protected my ears at any loud event... whenever I went out to a concert, club, loud bar, even when making a smoothie. I even started plugging up in movie theaters, because over the years, the volume seems to keep increasing (our society is so insane, it's stuck in this dangerous louder is better mentality), and I got tired of asking them to lower it a bit. This was with good ears, so my ears have always been a little more sensitive than other people's, which is why to this day, I'm still so angry at myself. I'll talk more about the regret later. I was in the car, literally had the earplugs in my hand, but put them back, because I thought to myself that this is a sweet gentle girl who's getting married, it won't be ear splitting rave volume. I'm also ashamed to say that I didn't feel like carrying them in my pocket, because I had other things in there... as if it's such a burden! Thinking back I can't believe my logic. Another emotional component is that during my sister's wedding a year earlier (good ears), I had a bad cold, was miserable, and by the time everything was setup, after all the running around, I was exhausted. So while everyone was chatting away / dancing at the reception, I just sat in my chair and observed it all with earplugs in. When people sat next to me to chat, between the noise, earplugs, and congestion, it wasn't that easy to have a conversation. That said, I wanted to be better for this wedding. More fun, more social, just a much better version of who I was at my sister's wedding. So I left the earplugs in the car, and went in, which was the biggest mistake of my life. It just eats away at me, how you can protect your ears for years, make one mistake, and that's it, you're done. How is that anywhere near fair?
There's this strange social conditioning that a lot of us fall into, the freezing, or fight part of fight / flight. Sticking around, because everyone else around you seems to be okay with it, so it probably won't harm you either. I've gone through so many years of personal development, getting past all that BS social conditioning, and just doing what feels right for me. I got good at that... accepting that I'm strange by society's standards, and more or less being a lone wolf who does his own thing. For my entire life, I've been the strange one, the one who doesn't quite fit in, so I used to care about how others perceived me. I thought I got over that, but apparently there's still some remnants left, that old version of myself. Anyway, all was good until the DJ/announcer started announcing the bridesmaids and their partners. It was waaay too loud, and then he started playing music as they walked into the room at ear splitting volume. This was in a country club room too, not outside. Then the bride and groom, the dancing, also piercingly loud. This is painful to rehash, because I know what I should have done... booked to the car as soon as he started, and gotten those damn plugs. Instead I felt frozen, paralyzed, because I was standing right next to one of the bridesmaids, didn't want to miss anything (remember me saying I wanted to be better for this wedding), didn't want to make a scene, which is absolutely insane, since the attention was clearly not focused on me. I also looked around, and nobody else was even flinching, so thought it might be okay. Bridesmaid, me, speaker. There was some distance between me and the speaker, there was one more table closer to it than mine, but still too close, as I've harshly learned. Just a poor setup in that medium sized room, now that I think back to it. I did leave briefly, went to the bathroom, and told myself my ears will adjust to it, noise damage is cumulative (so I thought), this one night won't harm me, I might have some temporary ringing. Part of me also wanted to see how the 'normal' people do it. I'm pretty sure nobody was wearing protection out there; wouldn't it be ironic if the DJ was, and dishing out pain to the rest of us. Again, really stupid logic, crushingly harsh lesson learned. Please don't rub it in, I already feel bad enough about this, as you can tell. I ended up running out to get my plugs halfway through this shindig, but by that time, the damage was already done.
When I woke up the next morning with a huge headache and ringing, I knew something was wrong. I also experienced aural fullness / intermittent pain, which I still constantly have to this day, in varying degrees, based on noise exposure. My mom who has T, and was also at the wedding, told me that hers was a little louder that morning. She's had it since 19 though, and has no noise sensitivity. Between that, and my dad's slowly deteriorating hearing, I shouldn't have risked it, but here I am now. Three days later, I was getting more nervous, but read something about a musician who stood next to a speaker during a show, and his tinnitus faded in a week, so still had hope. You guys know the drill of latching onto something, anything. I also noticed mild-moderate H around the same time, and started freaking out. This was all during the time when I was moving, so dealing with everything at once was very stressful. I found myself plugging up while moving things around, and not knowing what the hell was happening to me. I also regret not having the knowledge to take Prednisone in those early days. I have a negative perception towards western medicine, and have always gone the holistic route, but in this case, I wish I'd known to take steroids, because I might be in better shape today. I've never had noise trauma before, figured it would just heal on its own, and only saw a nurse practitioner about 10 days into it, to get wax removed (no microsuction), and started taking flonase / steroid drops. I saw an ENT shortly after I moved, aced the standard hearing test, and was told I have the hearing of a small child. Flattering, but similar to everyone else's experiences, he couldn't do much for me. He suggested I get checked for TMJ, I think partly because he wanted to point me in some direction, but I told him many times that this is directly from noise trauma. He also suggested that I see a neuro-otologist, which was good advice, but I haven't pursued my journey any further in western medicine, mainly because I have no faith in it to heal this type of damage. So my hearing is still pretty good, as it was before (with the exception of most likely some high frequency loss above 8,000 Hz), but the T adds this weird alien-like dimension, which makes life very uncomfortable. I know you all can relate.
To this day, I still have no idea what's happening to me, and it's terrifying. Am I getting better or worse? Hard to tell, because some days are better, and some are worse. It's truly mystifying. I was driving a few months ago, and my left ear completely unblocked itself. I was sooo happy, but now it's blocked up again. From all the stories I've read, my T & H is intrusive, but people out there have it much more severe, so compared to that it's mild. Still debilitating though. I have T in both ears (although left seems to have worse symptoms of T & H), high frequency / loud noise sensitivity (dishes / glasses clanking, loud voices, coughing, pressurized water, etc), shifting and ever present pressure / fullness / crackling, in varying degrees, depending on how much noise I was exposed to that day. Intermittent pain that comes and goes, which is thankfully quite mild compared to the stabbing / burning sensation I've read about. I experienced some burning in the beginning though, which luckily went away. I also experienced that unnerving heartbeat in ear sensation for a while (mostly right), especially when trying to sleep, but that went away as well. The fluttering was pretty unnerving too, but seems to have gone, and I experience that more rarely now. The pressure / fullness / sensitivity / pain H factors are what get to me most, and without those I'm convinced that I could manage my T without being a nervous wreck, using Julian Cowan Hill's advice of calming the nervous system. I still have to work on that regardless though. Rewatching his videos / internalizing his philosophy of T & H being more the result of a shocked / tweaked central nervous system, instead of physical damage, does give me hope. I've been exposing myself to normal sounds, trying not to fear them, as little earplug use as possible, in an attempt at gradual desensitization. I know, TRT is out there, but I'm also broke, so am trying to heal on my own, from all the knowledge I've acquired in my endless searching. The fact that some of my symptoms have subsided gives me something to hold onto, that in time this could all be a distant nightmare. What really gets to me is that when I do get better (when, not if), I'll have to baby my ears possibly for the rest of my life, and won't be able to enjoy moderately loud music in my car or headphones. But I'm getting ahead of myself, one step at a time.
Deep haunting regret... I should make an entire post on this, because this one is getting lengthy with my rambling. In short, how the hell do you forgive yourself for damaging something so incredibly precious to you, a perfect auditory experience, that doesn't naturally regenerate itself? We aren't birds or frogs. For some reason, our creator (whichever origin story you believe) decided not to incorporate regenerative hearing within the human blueprint. And I've been wondering for a long time now why that is. Why can't we regenerate our bodies more effectively as a species, why the painful limitations? We also aren't meant to be blasting ourselves with unnecessary high db noise, so that's definitely part of it. Over these 9 months, I go through phases of... The human body has miraculous healing abilities. Miracles can and do happen all the time. Our state of mind / emotional body / consciousness development is key to the mechanism of the miracle. Exercise / movement of energy is key to all this. Eating a mostly whole / raw food diet is key to all this. Into the depths of... The auditory system is basically its own mysterious closed ecosystem (has its own blood barrier!) that nobody understands, and it doesn't seem to heal / regenerate well. Horror stories of people doing slightly better, before another acoustic trauma happens, and their H is now severe for life. Maybe this condition just gets progressively worse. In that case, how can I ever get back to 'normal' by exposing myself to noise, and constantly fearing that it will worsen to a debilitating state where I can't function at all? This is the current state of mind that I'm in, and I'm desperately trying to claw my way out of it.
One thing that gives me the most hope, is a PEMF device that I've been experimenting with for around 4 months now, called the Earthpulse. I basically sleep with two electro-magnets under my foam mattress pad for 8 hours at a time (head and abdomen.) It's similar to the idea behind rTMS, but PEMF is much much lower intensity, gauss-wise. I think rTMS would be too intense for me, and I wanted something that I can treat myself with, and not have to deal with medical payments / insurance, etc. I'm pretty broke as it is. It's an interesting journey of self experimentation though. I can feel the healing pulses throughout my brain, and sometimes have to turn the intensity (amplitude) down, because I'd wake up with a headache (PEMF increases blood flow in the brain / other parts of the body which are bathed in the field.) I envision those waves penetrating my cochleas just before falling asleep, hehehe. Recent studies are actually validating what I've been doing, so that also gives me lots of encouragement that I'm on the right track, and just maybe even a little ahead of the curve. Things like DBS (deep brain stimulation) seem to use a 10 Hz 'envelope field'. I've also seen a recent article relating to 10 Hz sounds suppressing tinnitus. And another about magnetic delivery of drugs into the cochlea. The main frequencies that I use are 10 Hz, 9.6 Hz (possibly more effective than 10) and 2.4 Hz (for nerve regeneration.) I'd really appreciate it if you please don't reply with anything negative about PEMF, only inquisitive or insightful thoughts... I'm reluctant to post about it here, because I don't want anyone's limiting beliefs imposing upon my own currently fragile beliefs, but wanted to share my glimmer of hope with you, at the end of this long and somewhat despairing post. I've made up my mind that this is what I'm trying, because it's hard to find anything out there to truly heal T & H on a cellular / energetic level. I'll keep you all posted, because just under 4 months of pulsing is still in the early stages when it comes to long term healing, but I keep thinking that maybe I'd be worse off without it. Who knows, that's impossible to tell. If you're looking for some hope to hang onto, research electro-magnetic pulsing in general. With all the new studies I'm seeing pop up here and there, I think there's something to it. It's also been known to help people with parkinsons, autism, and other nervous system conditions, which is essentially what we're dealing with here... It all ties back to the nervous system.
Thanks so much for reading! I hope you didn't lose interest, and I'll try to keep my future posts a little shorter. I've been too bummed out to journal about any of this, so had to get all this out in whatever incoherent form I could. And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what I've been feeling through this journey. As you guys know, absolutely everything is affected. I can't drive with open windows and sing to music blasting at a moderate level anymore. Those days are gone, and that's devastating, because I'm a self trained singer. Even acoustic jam sessions are uncomfortable. It's beautiful outside now, and that's hard to deal with, because everyone is out and about doing simple things that I'd like to partake in (and mowing lawns, ughhh), while I'm recovering indoors, and walking in quieter areas / nature every now and then (good sound therapy, but lonely.) Even though I'm not sure if I'm actually recovering, or am just stuck this way, with a tweaked auditory perception / all the strange symptoms that come with it. I think maybe it was easier to deal with this in the winter, when things were quieter, and everyone draws into themselves. Social / family / normal everyday situations cause lots of anxiety now, and that makes me so incredibly sad. I'm a hermit these days. I'm dreading thanksgiving, and the fact that I might have to stay plugged up through most of it. But most importantly, you can't explain this shit to anyone, because it's such a rare condition! At least not the H part... My connection with both music and people is broken right now, and I'm not sure how to deal with that in a healthy way. Anyway, I posted once in the tinnitus sub on reddit, and made some connections, but you people here seem much more schooled with this. Reading old hyperacusis chat posts has also been extremely helpful, but that board seems a little inactive right now, and I could really use a tightly knit community to help me through this, and of course, to reciprocate that help as I get better myself. I've been reading / learning here for such a long time, and feel like I know some of you, at least on some level. I have mixed feelings about joining a T & H forum, because I'm afraid that it will keep me overly focused on my symptoms / make them worse, but we'll see how it goes. I think with this type of invisible affliction, support is much needed.
) have been a long, torturous, isolating road. I know all of you can relate, which is why I'm posting here, because nobody else in my life understands this at all. I can't really blame them though, because if my ears were still in perfect shape, as they were before my noise trauma, I probably wouldn't understand what this is like either. Before this, I didn't even know that H existed, and all the other bizarre symptoms that go with it. I knew about T, but never knew how intrusive it is, or fathomed that the ears could be damaged in this way.On that haunting day in November, I went to a wedding reception of my sister's friend, who I've known since childhood. I'm 30 now, and for most of my young adult life, I've always protected my ears at any loud event... whenever I went out to a concert, club, loud bar, even when making a smoothie. I even started plugging up in movie theaters, because over the years, the volume seems to keep increasing (our society is so insane, it's stuck in this dangerous louder is better mentality), and I got tired of asking them to lower it a bit. This was with good ears, so my ears have always been a little more sensitive than other people's, which is why to this day, I'm still so angry at myself. I'll talk more about the regret later. I was in the car, literally had the earplugs in my hand, but put them back, because I thought to myself that this is a sweet gentle girl who's getting married, it won't be ear splitting rave volume. I'm also ashamed to say that I didn't feel like carrying them in my pocket, because I had other things in there... as if it's such a burden! Thinking back I can't believe my logic. Another emotional component is that during my sister's wedding a year earlier (good ears), I had a bad cold, was miserable, and by the time everything was setup, after all the running around, I was exhausted. So while everyone was chatting away / dancing at the reception, I just sat in my chair and observed it all with earplugs in. When people sat next to me to chat, between the noise, earplugs, and congestion, it wasn't that easy to have a conversation. That said, I wanted to be better for this wedding. More fun, more social, just a much better version of who I was at my sister's wedding. So I left the earplugs in the car, and went in, which was the biggest mistake of my life. It just eats away at me, how you can protect your ears for years, make one mistake, and that's it, you're done. How is that anywhere near fair?
There's this strange social conditioning that a lot of us fall into, the freezing, or fight part of fight / flight. Sticking around, because everyone else around you seems to be okay with it, so it probably won't harm you either. I've gone through so many years of personal development, getting past all that BS social conditioning, and just doing what feels right for me. I got good at that... accepting that I'm strange by society's standards, and more or less being a lone wolf who does his own thing. For my entire life, I've been the strange one, the one who doesn't quite fit in, so I used to care about how others perceived me. I thought I got over that, but apparently there's still some remnants left, that old version of myself. Anyway, all was good until the DJ/announcer started announcing the bridesmaids and their partners. It was waaay too loud, and then he started playing music as they walked into the room at ear splitting volume. This was in a country club room too, not outside. Then the bride and groom, the dancing, also piercingly loud. This is painful to rehash, because I know what I should have done... booked to the car as soon as he started, and gotten those damn plugs. Instead I felt frozen, paralyzed, because I was standing right next to one of the bridesmaids, didn't want to miss anything (remember me saying I wanted to be better for this wedding), didn't want to make a scene, which is absolutely insane, since the attention was clearly not focused on me. I also looked around, and nobody else was even flinching, so thought it might be okay. Bridesmaid, me, speaker. There was some distance between me and the speaker, there was one more table closer to it than mine, but still too close, as I've harshly learned. Just a poor setup in that medium sized room, now that I think back to it. I did leave briefly, went to the bathroom, and told myself my ears will adjust to it, noise damage is cumulative (so I thought), this one night won't harm me, I might have some temporary ringing. Part of me also wanted to see how the 'normal' people do it. I'm pretty sure nobody was wearing protection out there; wouldn't it be ironic if the DJ was, and dishing out pain to the rest of us. Again, really stupid logic, crushingly harsh lesson learned. Please don't rub it in, I already feel bad enough about this, as you can tell. I ended up running out to get my plugs halfway through this shindig, but by that time, the damage was already done.
When I woke up the next morning with a huge headache and ringing, I knew something was wrong. I also experienced aural fullness / intermittent pain, which I still constantly have to this day, in varying degrees, based on noise exposure. My mom who has T, and was also at the wedding, told me that hers was a little louder that morning. She's had it since 19 though, and has no noise sensitivity. Between that, and my dad's slowly deteriorating hearing, I shouldn't have risked it, but here I am now. Three days later, I was getting more nervous, but read something about a musician who stood next to a speaker during a show, and his tinnitus faded in a week, so still had hope. You guys know the drill of latching onto something, anything. I also noticed mild-moderate H around the same time, and started freaking out. This was all during the time when I was moving, so dealing with everything at once was very stressful. I found myself plugging up while moving things around, and not knowing what the hell was happening to me. I also regret not having the knowledge to take Prednisone in those early days. I have a negative perception towards western medicine, and have always gone the holistic route, but in this case, I wish I'd known to take steroids, because I might be in better shape today. I've never had noise trauma before, figured it would just heal on its own, and only saw a nurse practitioner about 10 days into it, to get wax removed (no microsuction), and started taking flonase / steroid drops. I saw an ENT shortly after I moved, aced the standard hearing test, and was told I have the hearing of a small child. Flattering, but similar to everyone else's experiences, he couldn't do much for me. He suggested I get checked for TMJ, I think partly because he wanted to point me in some direction, but I told him many times that this is directly from noise trauma. He also suggested that I see a neuro-otologist, which was good advice, but I haven't pursued my journey any further in western medicine, mainly because I have no faith in it to heal this type of damage. So my hearing is still pretty good, as it was before (with the exception of most likely some high frequency loss above 8,000 Hz), but the T adds this weird alien-like dimension, which makes life very uncomfortable. I know you all can relate.
To this day, I still have no idea what's happening to me, and it's terrifying. Am I getting better or worse? Hard to tell, because some days are better, and some are worse. It's truly mystifying. I was driving a few months ago, and my left ear completely unblocked itself. I was sooo happy, but now it's blocked up again. From all the stories I've read, my T & H is intrusive, but people out there have it much more severe, so compared to that it's mild. Still debilitating though. I have T in both ears (although left seems to have worse symptoms of T & H), high frequency / loud noise sensitivity (dishes / glasses clanking, loud voices, coughing, pressurized water, etc), shifting and ever present pressure / fullness / crackling, in varying degrees, depending on how much noise I was exposed to that day. Intermittent pain that comes and goes, which is thankfully quite mild compared to the stabbing / burning sensation I've read about. I experienced some burning in the beginning though, which luckily went away. I also experienced that unnerving heartbeat in ear sensation for a while (mostly right), especially when trying to sleep, but that went away as well. The fluttering was pretty unnerving too, but seems to have gone, and I experience that more rarely now. The pressure / fullness / sensitivity / pain H factors are what get to me most, and without those I'm convinced that I could manage my T without being a nervous wreck, using Julian Cowan Hill's advice of calming the nervous system. I still have to work on that regardless though. Rewatching his videos / internalizing his philosophy of T & H being more the result of a shocked / tweaked central nervous system, instead of physical damage, does give me hope. I've been exposing myself to normal sounds, trying not to fear them, as little earplug use as possible, in an attempt at gradual desensitization. I know, TRT is out there, but I'm also broke, so am trying to heal on my own, from all the knowledge I've acquired in my endless searching. The fact that some of my symptoms have subsided gives me something to hold onto, that in time this could all be a distant nightmare. What really gets to me is that when I do get better (when, not if), I'll have to baby my ears possibly for the rest of my life, and won't be able to enjoy moderately loud music in my car or headphones. But I'm getting ahead of myself, one step at a time.
Deep haunting regret... I should make an entire post on this, because this one is getting lengthy with my rambling. In short, how the hell do you forgive yourself for damaging something so incredibly precious to you, a perfect auditory experience, that doesn't naturally regenerate itself? We aren't birds or frogs. For some reason, our creator (whichever origin story you believe) decided not to incorporate regenerative hearing within the human blueprint. And I've been wondering for a long time now why that is. Why can't we regenerate our bodies more effectively as a species, why the painful limitations? We also aren't meant to be blasting ourselves with unnecessary high db noise, so that's definitely part of it. Over these 9 months, I go through phases of... The human body has miraculous healing abilities. Miracles can and do happen all the time. Our state of mind / emotional body / consciousness development is key to the mechanism of the miracle. Exercise / movement of energy is key to all this. Eating a mostly whole / raw food diet is key to all this. Into the depths of... The auditory system is basically its own mysterious closed ecosystem (has its own blood barrier!) that nobody understands, and it doesn't seem to heal / regenerate well. Horror stories of people doing slightly better, before another acoustic trauma happens, and their H is now severe for life. Maybe this condition just gets progressively worse. In that case, how can I ever get back to 'normal' by exposing myself to noise, and constantly fearing that it will worsen to a debilitating state where I can't function at all? This is the current state of mind that I'm in, and I'm desperately trying to claw my way out of it.
One thing that gives me the most hope, is a PEMF device that I've been experimenting with for around 4 months now, called the Earthpulse. I basically sleep with two electro-magnets under my foam mattress pad for 8 hours at a time (head and abdomen.) It's similar to the idea behind rTMS, but PEMF is much much lower intensity, gauss-wise. I think rTMS would be too intense for me, and I wanted something that I can treat myself with, and not have to deal with medical payments / insurance, etc. I'm pretty broke as it is. It's an interesting journey of self experimentation though. I can feel the healing pulses throughout my brain, and sometimes have to turn the intensity (amplitude) down, because I'd wake up with a headache (PEMF increases blood flow in the brain / other parts of the body which are bathed in the field.) I envision those waves penetrating my cochleas just before falling asleep, hehehe. Recent studies are actually validating what I've been doing, so that also gives me lots of encouragement that I'm on the right track, and just maybe even a little ahead of the curve. Things like DBS (deep brain stimulation) seem to use a 10 Hz 'envelope field'. I've also seen a recent article relating to 10 Hz sounds suppressing tinnitus. And another about magnetic delivery of drugs into the cochlea. The main frequencies that I use are 10 Hz, 9.6 Hz (possibly more effective than 10) and 2.4 Hz (for nerve regeneration.) I'd really appreciate it if you please don't reply with anything negative about PEMF, only inquisitive or insightful thoughts... I'm reluctant to post about it here, because I don't want anyone's limiting beliefs imposing upon my own currently fragile beliefs, but wanted to share my glimmer of hope with you, at the end of this long and somewhat despairing post. I've made up my mind that this is what I'm trying, because it's hard to find anything out there to truly heal T & H on a cellular / energetic level. I'll keep you all posted, because just under 4 months of pulsing is still in the early stages when it comes to long term healing, but I keep thinking that maybe I'd be worse off without it. Who knows, that's impossible to tell. If you're looking for some hope to hang onto, research electro-magnetic pulsing in general. With all the new studies I'm seeing pop up here and there, I think there's something to it. It's also been known to help people with parkinsons, autism, and other nervous system conditions, which is essentially what we're dealing with here... It all ties back to the nervous system.
Thanks so much for reading! I hope you didn't lose interest, and I'll try to keep my future posts a little shorter. I've been too bummed out to journal about any of this, so had to get all this out in whatever incoherent form I could. And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what I've been feeling through this journey. As you guys know, absolutely everything is affected. I can't drive with open windows and sing to music blasting at a moderate level anymore. Those days are gone, and that's devastating, because I'm a self trained singer. Even acoustic jam sessions are uncomfortable. It's beautiful outside now, and that's hard to deal with, because everyone is out and about doing simple things that I'd like to partake in (and mowing lawns, ughhh), while I'm recovering indoors, and walking in quieter areas / nature every now and then (good sound therapy, but lonely.) Even though I'm not sure if I'm actually recovering, or am just stuck this way, with a tweaked auditory perception / all the strange symptoms that come with it. I think maybe it was easier to deal with this in the winter, when things were quieter, and everyone draws into themselves. Social / family / normal everyday situations cause lots of anxiety now, and that makes me so incredibly sad. I'm a hermit these days. I'm dreading thanksgiving, and the fact that I might have to stay plugged up through most of it. But most importantly, you can't explain this shit to anyone, because it's such a rare condition! At least not the H part... My connection with both music and people is broken right now, and I'm not sure how to deal with that in a healthy way. Anyway, I posted once in the tinnitus sub on reddit, and made some connections, but you people here seem much more schooled with this. Reading old hyperacusis chat posts has also been extremely helpful, but that board seems a little inactive right now, and I could really use a tightly knit community to help me through this, and of course, to reciprocate that help as I get better myself. I've been reading / learning here for such a long time, and feel like I know some of you, at least on some level. I have mixed feelings about joining a T & H forum, because I'm afraid that it will keep me overly focused on my symptoms / make them worse, but we'll see how it goes. I think with this type of invisible affliction, support is much needed.
Member
