By Erin W.
I learned to play chess two days ago. Naturally, I am not a skilled player yet. In one of my early games, I encountered a great match where my opponent continued to slowly close in on my king through some tricky moves. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of familiarity as I played out this game. My king kept jumping from one square to the next, trying to avoid the multiplying incoming threats. My pawns and rooks tried to protect it, but eventually, my king ran out of safe spots to jump to.
It was a stark analogy to my current situation. Going from room to room to avoid the barking dog out back or the noisy cars out front or the hum of the fridge. When all sounds can harm you, there comes a point where there’s nowhere to run. If you’re lucky, like me, your family does everything they can to help you. But sometimes, the damage is too much, the opponent too tricky.
Some people don’t start out with the same pieces as everyone else. Some people just get unlucky. Once you have noise damage, you’ve entered a lifelong game of chess. Depending on your susceptibility and severity of damage, one wrong move can be the difference between a careful quiet but happy life, and being bedbound. That concert with ear plugs cost you a pawn. A few songs too loud in the car just took your knight. A plate dropped in the sink just took your bishop. Closing the door snagged your queen. Now even swallowing food is too loud.
Will you recover from this setback? Or permanently worsen? Will your opponent show mercy? Sadly, auditory damage does not show mercy. It is ambivalent to our cries for quiet and peace.
The world of auditory health still focuses on profound hearing loss when assessing damage. As more young people develop tinnitus from earbuds, concerts, medications, etc., many will also develop hyperacusis, reactive tinnitus, and even noxacusis. They will be given hearing tests which often show no discernible hearing loss. White noise maskers and CBT will be recommended. These can be useful for those with mild stable tinnitus. For anyone above that, these can be very dangerous.
I’m sure most think “that couldn’t happen to me.” We all did. Those of us who were unlucky. Protect your ears and help push for more research into tinnitus, hyperacusis, reactive tinnitus, and noxacusis.
Once you lose a certain level of sound tolerance, there is no stabilizing. Time and quiet are your only hope until further research proves effective.
A loud firework just went off a block away, checkmate.
About the author: Erin W. suffers from severe reactive tinnitus, noxacusis, and middle ear myoclonus (MEM, with “fluttering or pulling” in her ears and loud SNAP sounds). She’s 32 and lives in South Carolina. She was recently featured on Hyperacusis Central. Click HERE to read about her journey fighting these conditions.
Great job, Erin!
Beautifully written
In your previous post you mentioned wellbutrin, I have spoken various people who developed tinnitus from starting that and many years later still not gone away, usually drug induced tinnitus goes once you stop. However after digging I found that that medication is notorious for causing acute dystonia, so if you have neck problems, see a phisotherapist to check c1-c4 areas for problems which can cause tinnitus. Whilst hyperacusis comes usually with tinnitus, the wellbutrin could be the cause of this, especially if caused certain neck muscles to spasm etc. Also our reaction to sound due to a collapsed tolerance can stress the jaw and neck muscles which can cause refered pain to ear upon your reaction to sound.
The reactive tinnitus and phantom sounds should improve when hyperacusis improves, but since you can’t tollerate sound for sound therapy I would work backwards and focus on treating the pain and tinnitus, to calm things down then be able to tollerate the standard treatment.
There a different types of ear pain from sounds, and require different treatments and management, learning to identify types is important for getting this under control, sadly there is no proper medical guidance on this so people just call it nox, however you can experience multiple types of pain which have similar characteristics at the same time, e.g burning pain, so its also very confusing, but there are ways to tell what is causing the pain.
Also recently after acquiring an infection , i started getting random tinnitus tones (which i never had before), I started taking doxycilin and by the 2nd or 3rd day it was gone – check for infections. If you have no symptoms of infection look for silent infections, regardless how improbable you might think.
If you can’t afford a phisotherapist, find phisotherapy exercises pdfs online for strengthing neck (e.g chin tuck) and spine (e.g bird dog). If you have neck stiffness, add neck stretching exercises. Develop a daily routine, set a daily alarm for 5 days a week, and do it regardless how bad you feel. It may seem like a lot of work, but there is no magic pill to fix all this, and if the tinnitus is caused by cervical instability you have to work on this.
Hyperacusis comes with other symptoms and causes a cluster fck of additional symptoms , and if you don’t treat them everything gets worse then you develop more.
(I had to type this in a tiny box on a tiny screen, hope it makes sense)