I've been lurking here for awhile, watching from afar from the Yuku board. This place seems to have a vibrant and growing community so I thought I'd throw my chips in here and share my story.
On November 23, 2011, I woke up to a high pitched squealing in my ears along with an oscillating electrical hiss. The culprit was a Nintendo DS charger that had habit of emitting a high pitched whine after being fully charged stimulating my high pitched hearing to the pain threshold in my sleep, being triggered by a Dirt Devil being turned on on the floor below me. (Yes, I am probably the one person in human history that has or ever will have T from an Ace Attorney gaming marathon.)
Needless to say, this freaked me out to no end. Sleeplessness, anxiety, panic attacks, I was a wreck. I lost several pounds the first week. The squeal I'd started with morphed into all kinds of crazy warbling tonal "eeeeeeEEEEeeEE" noises over time and the electrical hiss was unpredictable and changed in intensity from hour to hour, ranging from being able to be masked by nothing but mild nature sounds to competing with the shower.
Just as bad, I'd discovered, was that certain things did NOT sound the same. I found that running water, fridge noise, really any kind of white noise produced a screechy overtone or morse code tones. CRT TVs now emitted an incredibly painful noise that joined in with my T and made it sound 10 times worse. My masking attempts were met with considerable frustration, and I never found anything that worked consistently.
But slowly, very slowly things began to improve. By 10 weeks in, all of the tonal noises I was experiencing had stopped completely. By 4-6 months in, the previously unpredictable electrical hiss had become much softer, much more stable, and followed a daily pattern, beginning practically silent in the morning, and somewhere a bit more annoying by late evening.
I was of course, disappointed that it never went away fully, nor did the "reactive noise" phenomemon (though that aspect did improve somewhat with the exception of CRT noise). All the same, I considered myself one of the luckiest sons of guns on Earth that I'd started with something so intrusive and ended up with what was (mostly) mild T. I couldn't tell you what I did aside from avoiding noise very consciousentiously (or perhaps I was one of the few people that lucked out from my doctor's Prednisone course).
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It stayed that way for a year and a half, and I was hoping that with caution it'd never get worse... but the universe had other ideas.
I'd injured my wrist in November (pins and needles, numbness, likely carpal tunnel from a bit too much computer gaming...). Was given Vicodin, and on November 19th of this year, I took one pill: 5 mg Hydrocodone / 500 mg Acetimenophen. 10 minutes later, I noticed my ears suddenly had a building sense of pressure in them, a sensation not unlike someone turning a knob in your chochleas. A sensation not unlike a threshold shift.
My immediate reaction , as you can imagine, was a panicked "OH CRAP"; I ran into silence, and noticed that my mild oscillating hiss was now brewing itself back into a high pitched electrical thunderstorm like "the good old days". Even the squeal had come back to my right ear. I immediately purged my stomach afterwards, but by that point the damage had been done.
Being over a month in now, the initial panic has washed over, but it's still a major monkey on my back, and there are still several times a day I feel like I'd take an ice pick to my brain to be rid of it. The quiet mornings I used to look forward to everyday are gone now, and the kindling effect everyday noise has on my T is obnoxious. And the reactive sound? Seems like everything provokes it now, even the ventilation system in my house...
I'm still holding out some hope that maybe lightning will strike twice and my T might resolve to it's previous level, but it feels distant at this point. I feel like my story would be a lot more inspirational without this major setback, but that's the way this cookie has crumbled.
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Anyhoo, I'll be peeping around here until either this settles or I "get used to it" (sigh). I wish I didn't have to be here, nor any of you. Tinnitus is a ridiculous affliction. God (and science) have mercy on everyone suffering with this.
With any luck I hope we'll all wake up to silent mornings again someday.
On November 23, 2011, I woke up to a high pitched squealing in my ears along with an oscillating electrical hiss. The culprit was a Nintendo DS charger that had habit of emitting a high pitched whine after being fully charged stimulating my high pitched hearing to the pain threshold in my sleep, being triggered by a Dirt Devil being turned on on the floor below me. (Yes, I am probably the one person in human history that has or ever will have T from an Ace Attorney gaming marathon.)
Needless to say, this freaked me out to no end. Sleeplessness, anxiety, panic attacks, I was a wreck. I lost several pounds the first week. The squeal I'd started with morphed into all kinds of crazy warbling tonal "eeeeeeEEEEeeEE" noises over time and the electrical hiss was unpredictable and changed in intensity from hour to hour, ranging from being able to be masked by nothing but mild nature sounds to competing with the shower.
Just as bad, I'd discovered, was that certain things did NOT sound the same. I found that running water, fridge noise, really any kind of white noise produced a screechy overtone or morse code tones. CRT TVs now emitted an incredibly painful noise that joined in with my T and made it sound 10 times worse. My masking attempts were met with considerable frustration, and I never found anything that worked consistently.
But slowly, very slowly things began to improve. By 10 weeks in, all of the tonal noises I was experiencing had stopped completely. By 4-6 months in, the previously unpredictable electrical hiss had become much softer, much more stable, and followed a daily pattern, beginning practically silent in the morning, and somewhere a bit more annoying by late evening.
I was of course, disappointed that it never went away fully, nor did the "reactive noise" phenomemon (though that aspect did improve somewhat with the exception of CRT noise). All the same, I considered myself one of the luckiest sons of guns on Earth that I'd started with something so intrusive and ended up with what was (mostly) mild T. I couldn't tell you what I did aside from avoiding noise very consciousentiously (or perhaps I was one of the few people that lucked out from my doctor's Prednisone course).
----------------------
It stayed that way for a year and a half, and I was hoping that with caution it'd never get worse... but the universe had other ideas.
I'd injured my wrist in November (pins and needles, numbness, likely carpal tunnel from a bit too much computer gaming...). Was given Vicodin, and on November 19th of this year, I took one pill: 5 mg Hydrocodone / 500 mg Acetimenophen. 10 minutes later, I noticed my ears suddenly had a building sense of pressure in them, a sensation not unlike someone turning a knob in your chochleas. A sensation not unlike a threshold shift.
My immediate reaction , as you can imagine, was a panicked "OH CRAP"; I ran into silence, and noticed that my mild oscillating hiss was now brewing itself back into a high pitched electrical thunderstorm like "the good old days". Even the squeal had come back to my right ear. I immediately purged my stomach afterwards, but by that point the damage had been done.
Being over a month in now, the initial panic has washed over, but it's still a major monkey on my back, and there are still several times a day I feel like I'd take an ice pick to my brain to be rid of it. The quiet mornings I used to look forward to everyday are gone now, and the kindling effect everyday noise has on my T is obnoxious. And the reactive sound? Seems like everything provokes it now, even the ventilation system in my house...
I'm still holding out some hope that maybe lightning will strike twice and my T might resolve to it's previous level, but it feels distant at this point. I feel like my story would be a lot more inspirational without this major setback, but that's the way this cookie has crumbled.
----------------------------
Anyhoo, I'll be peeping around here until either this settles or I "get used to it" (sigh). I wish I didn't have to be here, nor any of you. Tinnitus is a ridiculous affliction. God (and science) have mercy on everyone suffering with this.
With any luck I hope we'll all wake up to silent mornings again someday.
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