Hey,
So I've technically had tinnitus since I can remember, but except for a couple episodes after being in a very loud environment, it's been so quiet that it's only noticeable in a completely silent room.
Skip ahead till April of this year, I moved to a new place. It's near some bars, some noisy neighbours both in and out of the building I live in (I live in a split house), and I'm a very light sleeper. So I tried turning a fan on in my bedroom to sleep through it and it worked well but I noticed a few days in there was a noise, mostly in my right here. I guess I'd probably describe it as really high pitched snow (which is very different than the tinnitus I had before which sounded like a low dial tone). Obviously I stopped using the fan right away, but I noticed very quickly that my tinnitus was very sensitive to noise. Especially sustained noises like fans, music, etc. And at one point it even started spiking enough it started developing new tones. So I tried not to aggravate it, and luckily it slowly calmed down to the point where only really loud/sustained noises bothered me, and luckily those were easy to avoid.
Since then I've aggravated it a couple times, it got very sensitive to any noise for a while, I avoided spiking it as best I could and it calmed down again.
Recently, (late August) they started construction on the street directly outside my apartment. They replaced the pipes under the street. It took them four weeks, working very often 10 hour days. Quite a bit of the work was focused directly outside my first story apartment. At one point I remember them filling the road back in, and then two days later digging it all up again because something had been connected wrong. I'm disabled in other ways and deal with chronic, and leaving my small apartment for more than hour at a time wasn't really an option (plus my ears were so sensitive at the time due to another recent trauma it was spiking them anyways), so I opted to use noise protection headphones/earplugs to protect as best I could. My tinnitus got really bad anyways.
It's been about a week and half now since they've been gone and my tinnitus has only gotten worse since. It's set off by everything. There's new loud tones in my ears all the time, a loud dial tone, something that sounds kind of like wind chimes and a low buzzing that sounds a bit like mosquito buzzing by your ear are all frequently there to varying degrees and seem to come and go without any discernible pattern. It feels like my ears are permanently spiked. Before I could quiet my ears by avoiding noise, but tones come and get louder even in total silence.
They also get louder at the slightest noise. I can't even have a 10 minute conversation with my neigbhour upstairs without noticing a significant increase.
I know I'm overprotecting my ears and that's making them more sensitive, but now I seem to have reached a point where they spike even in very quiet rooms without any noise protection on.
My current plan is I've cancelled everything I have this week to avoid going out and exposing myself to major spikes, and I'm trying to use noise protection devices as little as possible (until the spikes get to be too much) in hopes I can acclimate my ears again to at least normal sound. I'm trying to listen to things on my laptop for short periods at low levels, and anything that doesn't give me a noticeable spike, I'm going to keep doing. And hopefully my ears might start to calm down a bit and tolerate more noise.
Otherwise I have no idea how to deal with this. I live in a small city in the middle of nowhere with very few resource, and we have no ear specialists and no hearing therapists. And because of other disabilities travelling long distances isn't an option for me. I have seen an ENT that's two hours away in Winnipeg, (though it was a painful experience and I don't want to do it again unless i know it will help), and she did a hearing test (my hearing is apparently very good), and asked some questions. But since at the time my spikes weren't giving me any problems, and I'd mostly gotten used to the permanent high pitched tone, she let me go. I saw my doctor recently, but she's just a family practitioner, and all she did was give me a script for ativan and an appointment in two months to see where I'm at then.
Has anyone here been through anything similar? Does anyone know of any resources they can point me to? Because I honestly have no idea what I'm doing or what's really going on with my ears. I'll be really happy if I can just figure out how to get to a point where they're getting better again, because right now it seems like no matter what I do they just keep getting louder and more sensitive.
Thank you to anyone who read through this whole thing. Sorry I wrote a novel, I tried to keep it as short as I could. Any help at all would be really appreciated.
So I've technically had tinnitus since I can remember, but except for a couple episodes after being in a very loud environment, it's been so quiet that it's only noticeable in a completely silent room.
Skip ahead till April of this year, I moved to a new place. It's near some bars, some noisy neighbours both in and out of the building I live in (I live in a split house), and I'm a very light sleeper. So I tried turning a fan on in my bedroom to sleep through it and it worked well but I noticed a few days in there was a noise, mostly in my right here. I guess I'd probably describe it as really high pitched snow (which is very different than the tinnitus I had before which sounded like a low dial tone). Obviously I stopped using the fan right away, but I noticed very quickly that my tinnitus was very sensitive to noise. Especially sustained noises like fans, music, etc. And at one point it even started spiking enough it started developing new tones. So I tried not to aggravate it, and luckily it slowly calmed down to the point where only really loud/sustained noises bothered me, and luckily those were easy to avoid.
Since then I've aggravated it a couple times, it got very sensitive to any noise for a while, I avoided spiking it as best I could and it calmed down again.
Recently, (late August) they started construction on the street directly outside my apartment. They replaced the pipes under the street. It took them four weeks, working very often 10 hour days. Quite a bit of the work was focused directly outside my first story apartment. At one point I remember them filling the road back in, and then two days later digging it all up again because something had been connected wrong. I'm disabled in other ways and deal with chronic, and leaving my small apartment for more than hour at a time wasn't really an option (plus my ears were so sensitive at the time due to another recent trauma it was spiking them anyways), so I opted to use noise protection headphones/earplugs to protect as best I could. My tinnitus got really bad anyways.
It's been about a week and half now since they've been gone and my tinnitus has only gotten worse since. It's set off by everything. There's new loud tones in my ears all the time, a loud dial tone, something that sounds kind of like wind chimes and a low buzzing that sounds a bit like mosquito buzzing by your ear are all frequently there to varying degrees and seem to come and go without any discernible pattern. It feels like my ears are permanently spiked. Before I could quiet my ears by avoiding noise, but tones come and get louder even in total silence.
They also get louder at the slightest noise. I can't even have a 10 minute conversation with my neigbhour upstairs without noticing a significant increase.
I know I'm overprotecting my ears and that's making them more sensitive, but now I seem to have reached a point where they spike even in very quiet rooms without any noise protection on.
My current plan is I've cancelled everything I have this week to avoid going out and exposing myself to major spikes, and I'm trying to use noise protection devices as little as possible (until the spikes get to be too much) in hopes I can acclimate my ears again to at least normal sound. I'm trying to listen to things on my laptop for short periods at low levels, and anything that doesn't give me a noticeable spike, I'm going to keep doing. And hopefully my ears might start to calm down a bit and tolerate more noise.
Otherwise I have no idea how to deal with this. I live in a small city in the middle of nowhere with very few resource, and we have no ear specialists and no hearing therapists. And because of other disabilities travelling long distances isn't an option for me. I have seen an ENT that's two hours away in Winnipeg, (though it was a painful experience and I don't want to do it again unless i know it will help), and she did a hearing test (my hearing is apparently very good), and asked some questions. But since at the time my spikes weren't giving me any problems, and I'd mostly gotten used to the permanent high pitched tone, she let me go. I saw my doctor recently, but she's just a family practitioner, and all she did was give me a script for ativan and an appointment in two months to see where I'm at then.
Has anyone here been through anything similar? Does anyone know of any resources they can point me to? Because I honestly have no idea what I'm doing or what's really going on with my ears. I'll be really happy if I can just figure out how to get to a point where they're getting better again, because right now it seems like no matter what I do they just keep getting louder and more sensitive.
Thank you to anyone who read through this whole thing. Sorry I wrote a novel, I tried to keep it as short as I could. Any help at all would be really appreciated.
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