Pinpoint the Moment

[Jean Francois]

Can you pinpoint the moment that you damaged your hearing to the extent that you'd suffer from tinnitus for decades after?

Luckily/unluckily (depending on your perspective), I can....

I was 17 and was at my first heavy metal concert. I decided to make my way to the front of the stage and enjoy the band fromn there. Right next to a stack of Marshall amplifiers. I recall even at the time, thinking "Maybe this ain't such a good idea..." Suffice it to say that my right ear was never the same again. Add a few more heavy metal concerts into the mix over the next few years, and both ears have ended up with damage, with the left ear being worse than the right.

I cottoned on the the fact that , if I was going to keep going to concerts, I'd need to start protecting my ears and started wearing foam earplugs. I'm glad that I did, but also unhappy that I didn't come to that conclusion a little sooner.

Having read some of the stories on the forum, I realise that the slight hissing I hear all the time is nowhere near as bad as it can get, as I certainly don't feel the need for any medication. So, although I have tinnitus, I am grateful for the fact that it's manageable. I get the odd clicking sound in the right ear, but it's infrequent.

Also, forgot to add the years of headphone use with my walkman and then minidisc player didn't help much. I always make sure to regulate volume levels nowadays with the iPod

 

[FuzzyFrey]

I can too. I was 21 and was working on my computer with a pair of headphones I borrowed from my dad - thinking the type they were meant I could get away with listening to music loud with them - unlike my iPod headphones. I was wrong. I finished with a high pitched whistling in my head that I'd never encountered before. I realised something bad had happened and it wasn't easy to overcome. The irony was I thought those headphones wouldn't as likely hurt me, but that's exactly what they did!

I never felt the need to mask my tinnitus. It couldn't be masked anyway, it kept getting louder whenever I was immersed in noise. But in the end I learned to ignore it and now it's not a big problem any more. If it could be cured though I'd take it in a nanosecond

I also started developing T in my right ear due to not wearing protection when playing with my rock band when I was in my mid-teens. I started wearing earplugs and I'm happy to say that it hasn't got worse. But now I get new T noises coming from elsewhere for whatever reason so I'll always have something new to contend with

 

[Albert Savage]

My T happened to me when I was 19. I was in the Army and serving in what was then West Berlin. My unit was training a unit from West Germany in how to fight in built-up areas. I was crawling through a tunnel when some one threw a hand grenade simulator (a very large fire cracker) in to the tunnel after me. The explosion left me suffering with tinnitus and both high and low frequency hearing loss. That happened in April of 1972.

About 18 months later, my hearing loss proved a challenge when I was in a class to learn the Thai language. Like all (most?) Asian languages, Thai is a five tone language and I only heard the middle three tones. Some how I still passed the course and qualified as a linguist in the Thai language. And then I was promptly assigned to the 101st Airborne Division in Kentucky.