Sorry to hear that. Was there an incident that causes hearing damage?
I’ve had tinnitus since the 90s - I played in a very loud band. I also developed hyperacusis around 2001.
But the incident last year had to do with me listening to music too loud and too long.
That is for me, since I have a lower than normal threshold before loud sounds starts to ignite my Tinnitus.
I had always been careful about volume levels when listening to music at home or at audiophile friend’s places.
Sometime in 2018 I made the mistake of visiting a beach area unaware that moments later low-flying squadrons of fighter jets would be striving overhead on their way to an airshow over the lake. I had no earplugs with me, and the sound was so loud it vibrated my entire body and completely screwed up my ears. Examined by an audiologist, the diagnosis was the alarmingly phrased “ catastrophic hyperacusis.” Even the softest of sounds hurt my ears. At times I could barely even talk.
This finally forced me to do something about my hyperacusis. I’d known of a possible treatment based on tinnitus retraining therapy, which used small hearing aid like devices in the ear to softly pump in carefully sculpted white noise which overtime was supposed to help the brain recalibrate and get used to noise. (The devices reduce dynamic range to a degree so sounds hard as startling, and over many months, the nature of the sound is changed and the sound is dialled higher and higher).
I underwent the therapy and the result was, while not a total cure, that my regular hearing came back, and was more robust then it had been in 20 years. It was frankly glorious.
When I visit my audio buddy friends place and he’d hand me the remote because he always knew I wanted to carefully control the volume. After the treatment, he couldn’t believe how loud I could comfortably listen. A real change from all the years he’d known me.
Anyway, things were great for a number of years, and then I got too greedy last year and started playing louder and louder, for really long periods of time. My tinnitus would flare a bit but then quickly go back down so I didn’t think much of it.
And then one night I had been listening for about three hours loud (for me) and I noticed my ears ringing, but I thought “ oh well, it will go away well, just deal with it after” and so I kept listening loud for another couple hours.
When I turn off the music I couldn’t believe how loud my ears were ringing. It was pretty shocking. And my usual strategies did not get it to go away. I couldn’t sleep. It would keep waking me up. And that freaked me out.
Essentially, that was a start of where I am now a year later.
By the summer I had at least habituated so that it wasn’t bothering me much during the day and I could sleep through the night.
But then, as I described earlier in the thread, I was reaching for a pan in the cupboards over our fridge when parts holding the pans broke and all the big metal pans started falling and crashing around my ears…. Which sent me right back to square one for many months.
At this point, I have at least habituated to sleeping through the night and to the tinnitus rarely bothering me during the day. But not yet up to listening to music or watching movies.
Anyway, my heart goes out to others in this thread who have really struggled with this condition. There sure are a lot of us.
And sometimes when there are loud sounds or my allergies get bad. Still would be nice to have it treated. Mine is the type that is the frequencies I don't hear anymore, i.e. very high pitch sound.
