Probably this has happened to a lot of people. At least he hasn't sent you to get an MRI scan to rule out acoustic neuroma.
Yeah well, considering what happened to me an MRI makes a shit ton of sense but everyone's playing wait and see until it gets even worse.
There are MRI techniques now that can diagnose hydrops (very very new) as well as to detect lesions due to autoimmune attacks.
When I had my last worsening, I had exercised after listening to 70dB music, however it wasn't insanely loud and my ears though ringing as they always do when working out and feeling a bit fluttery, calmed down within an hour and... frankly everything was fine.
Until I went to sleep.
I woke up in the middle of the night to "chimes" all over my headspace, literally everywhere and I saw a flurry of sparkles of light that went along with them... by morning I had LOUD chimes emanating from my jaw. It felt like when they went off that I'd hear a random "CHIME!" go through my skull, on both sides of my head.
That slowly went away... and I continued with HBOT as it seemed to help with the "static" tinnitus.
On my last session, I was at 2.3ATM and we held there. As I breathed in I could hear the tinnitus tones which were raging from the drive diminish to zero. Silence. I could still hear the chimes but they were quieter.
Then out of nowhere, I heard "shit you not" a thousand sound effects come to life. An actual FLURRY of sound throughout my head, sounds I didn't know existed. They persisted after I GTFO of the chamber.
They persisted over white noise, road noise, everything. That's what my sound distortion began as.
I took 1mg Clonazepam which lowered the distortions and sound effects by 90% in volume only, went to the ER, they basically said we can't help you and won't wake an ENT for this and sent me home. Had distortions and the sound effects ever since... however over the first month they did improve a lot, but are most definitely always still there. I'm down to 5 sound effects and blaring 500 Hz tinnitus at night... but that hasn't moved and basically been getting worse now over time not better as of mid November.
The sound effects ARE the distortion I've found out, I can hear them over white noise, music, etc... sounds in fact trigger them.
If any of this sounds like a seizure (which HBOT can cause), that's why I've been pressing for an MRI and neurologist.
I do think benzos have something to do with it... to cope with tinnitus I was using them pretty often at highish doses, but had been free of drugs and able to sleep with earplugs in (imagine that) for about a week... I'd wake up to two staticy tones, and earplug removal yielded at least a minute of silence... basically I was getting better and I knew it. I did HBOT after the chimes because I was supposed to keep doing it and also thought maybe the chimes would go away as well and that it was a new form of tinnitus I didn't know about.
This happened at the end of that week... so although I certainly wasn't "anxious" or an insomniac from benzo withdrawl (which was basically zero, like no additional symptoms whatsoever on tapering off, and I had been using them pretty regularly for 5 weeks)... I wonder if my auditory nerves in fact were in withdrawal / downregulated and had two literal seizures. To me that makes little sense, an autoimmune attack makes more sense... HBOT also allows more endothelial cell perforation.
The last round of steroids I had because my doctor thought "another course can't hurt" and I was left with worse hearing coming out of it, more distortions, and now loud seashell droning sounds at 500 Hz. That's when I "finally" made the connection that steroids were 100% making this worse (something similar had happened on the first course on finishing).
At the end of the day, I think I truly know what hell is, and I found out during that HBOT session.
If it had stayed that way & Clonazepam didn't work, I was going to blow my brains out the next day.
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