Tomorrow, after many months of putting it off, I’m going to see some audiology/neurology specialists at Vanderbilt about my tinnitus, a condition I’ve had at a low level all my life, but which has gotten worse since turning 50 and worse still in this stressful year. I thought it would be wise to write down a kind of case history to make sure I don’t forget to tell the docs anything and to share the experience in case anybody who reads this has similar stories.
When I started going to shows as a young guy, I noticed that when I came home and lay down in the dark to sleep, my ears would ring. I didn’t think much of it because the sensation would be gone the next day. Then one night when I was about 16, I found myself in an auditorium at NC State in Raleigh with The Ramones, and the PA was louder than anything I’d experienced. At first it was uncomfortable, but I got used to it because it was awesome, and I didn’t yet know about volume-induced hearing damage. When I went to sleep that night, my skull rang like never before. Over the next day or two it definitely settled down, but there was a residual ring that simply never stopped.
For most of my life, I could only really hear my tinnitus in very quiet places, like taking in a night sky in the wilderness. There it bothered me a bit that I couldn’t experience pure silence, but I rationalized it as hearing the cosmic background noise or something. Sometimes it sounded like crickets in a field at night, which I could accept. The normal sounds of life and music simply drowned out the ringing and I didn’t give my minor disability much thought at all. I also learned about tinnitus and took much better care of my hearing. I wore earplugs where appropriate, and I’ve never enjoyed loud music for its own sake. I thought the bumper sticker “If it’s too loud, you’re too old” was a knucklehead thing to think or say. Clearly, I damaged some of the cilia hairs in my inner ear, but fortunately I could always pass an audiology exam with flying colors. The ringing was phantom sound, neurons firing due to physiological damage, and for this there’s no cure. I accepted that.
But after I turned 50, the ringing grew in intensity and started to intrude on daily life. I could hear it distinctly during quieter passages in music. It didn’t keep me from sleeping, but I was certainly aware of it as I lay in bed at night or in the morning. Then something peculiar happened. I upgraded my stereo system in my studio and while I reveled in the improved fidelity for the early months of this year, I began to get an extra jolt of shiny tone up about 8,000 hertz, as if it was reacting to the room in a feedback loop. Listening sessions became fatiguing and even scary. Was music making my tinnitus worse? Was my favorite art form and the bedrock of my living starting to become dangerous?
The catalog of things I’ve read about that could exacerbate tinnitus includes aging, stress, caffeine, salt, ibuprofen and alcohol. (From that list I’m willing to give up caffeine, stress and aging.) But one thing I’m pretty sure about is that it’s a neurological problem and not additional physical damage to my inner ear. I say that because I’ve been wearing hearing protection for decades and avoiding very loud music altogether. And I can ameliorate the worst of it with a few techniques. I did about six weeks of acupuncture, and while I don’t think the needles or cupping did any good at all, the scalp and neck massages were fantastic and always gave me a few hours of relief. Another technique that is pretty interesting is an app I found (myNoise) that produces random chaotic sound in the upper registers, like high pitched wind chimes. It’s pleasant to listen to on headphones, and after just about a minute, my nerves sending much of the signal will calm down and my tinnitus is reduced to a dull oceanic hiss. It’s quite astonishing sometimes, but the effect doesn’t last. It just gives me some minutes of respite, which is worth something and suggests there might be a therapy in this direction.
A final note is that I’m listening to music now almost exclusively on high quality headphones where I don’t have the feedback reaction. I still hear my tinnitus competing with the music, even as I write this, but I don’t feel like I’m doing harm.
I’ll follow up with a report from what I find out at the famous Bill Wilkerson Center.
“Self Portrait As A Deaf Man” by Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1775, The Tate Collection.