By Jerad J. D. Rider

When I was almost nine in 1994, my mom remarried and she, my brother, and I moved to live with her husband. It was summertime, and one day my brother—two years older than me—suggested we shoot a Back to the Future parody with a VHS camcorder. He was playing Doc and wore a frizzy silver wig to frame his rounded face, and I got to be the badass rebel Marty. With my thatch of brunette hair, eye behind the camera, puffy dark orange vest and stone-washed jeans, the likeness was pretty good. We recited our lines while running and jumping on the hardwood floor to act out the scene at the mall where Doc and Marty realize the time machine works. Thumping and creaking rained into the basement, our stepdad’s living quarters.

Not long after our stepdad came up the stairs and confronted us. Ironically he had the air of the villains that were part of the scenes we were planning to film, where the angry Libyan terrorists show up at the mall to get revenge on Doc for stealing their plutonium to power his invention. We didn’t plan to show the terrorists; we thought we could skirt around that problem by making them audible off camera. But then our stepdad came and essentially filled the role, with his sweaty furrowed brow, telling narrowed eyes, and especially telling snarl. This giant made us feel the anguish of the fictional Doc and Marty in this real situation, made us so uneasy since we didn’t know him well. Then he voiced why he was mad: “Please don’t run up here. It makes a lot of noise.” We noticed how softly he spoke and thought that was strange in relation to his anger.

Later, we learned from our mom that he had damaged hearing, and that the noise we had made felt loud and painful to his ears. What we didn’t learn—since we were only children, and couldn’t comprehend what we had not experienced—is that our stepdad’s sense of sound was like a cranked speaker. Depending on the type of sound, his pain was sometimes like needles piercing his eardrums, and other times like hot irons burning them. To me it seemed like Superman’s super hearing, yet oh how wrong I was; there was nothing super about it. The only way in which it related to Superman was kryptonite. Sounds were those glowing green meteors, emanating torture.

His ears had plagued him for years, and he knew that jackhammers, claw hammers, and bulldozers had damaged them—sound abuse, in other words, relating to his job as a construction manager. He’d traveled through the USA, building big hotels, as far out as Texas when it came to the south and Massachusetts the north. It caught up with his ears.

He didn’t know his disability had a name. Even more than now, 1994 was an unenlightened era for hearing sensitivities, as science hadn’t made the distinctions between the variants, like loudness hyperacusis and pain hyperacusis. And therefore he also didn’t know his condition was actually two conditions. (The variants are crucial to understand. While reading this story, you’ll see how a lack of understanding will affect my life as well, leading to a reckoning.) His symptoms fell in the mild-to-moderate range.

In the years that followed, my mom’s and stepdad’s marriage grew chilly, partly due to his traveling for work, and, like what happens with a lot of marriages, the discernment that their differences surpassed their similarities—they weren’t well matched. They divorced in ’98. Nonetheless, it would almost take a decade to see the significance of meeting my former stepdad and witnessing his ear conditions—conditions so rare that patients who have them often report that the doctors they saw who specialize in ears (ENTs) told them they had never met a hyperacusis patient (which highlights the rarity of noise sensitivity, as ENTs would have a greater chance of meeting patients with it). So the irony wasn’t lost on me when I developed these ear conditions later. It was freakish in terms of odds, so freakish it made me think it had been a warning from God, as if He were saying Beware, you don’t want to cross this thing again. If so, stupidly, I missed the deterrent.

In 2002, I was a sixteen-year-old punk who had dyed his hair black, wanting to emulate the cyber hero Neo from The Matrix. I was ecstatic to be getting my driver’s license, and the last thing on my mind was ear dilemmas. But one afternoon I got home from school and went into my room to take a nap. It was mostly quiet, and that was why I noticed the faint bilateral tinnitus. EEEEEEEEEEEE. Which drew in many thoughts: What the hell is this? I hope it goes away. It didn’t. Hope was extinguished as minutes, hours, and days evolved into weeks. I didn’t think of my former stepdad yet, as he had never talked about tinnitus. He only had the noise sensitivities.

I ruminated more. While I couldn’t say for sure what had caused the ringing, research made me suspect a trio of possibilities: (1) normal but unhealthy sound exposures (by “normal” and “unhealthy,” I mean the same amount of noise that any kid or teen would expose to, yet that doesn’t mean it’s healthy; I thought about my childhood and remembered the fireworks we messed with on Independence Day every year, and the cap guns we regularly shot, and wondered if any of that noise played a role; who can say that fireworks weren’t part of their childhood?—like I said, normal but unhealthy); (2) my excessive use of acne-clearing pads with maximum-strength salicylic acid, which can be ototoxic (aspirin has the same ingredient, and it’s known for hearing damage; I used the pads for just about a year, drenching my face three times daily to ward off that stubborn skin condition; I remember tasting the rubbing alcohol when it got on my lips and having to spit it out); (3) poor ear genetics (which James A. Henry, PhD, author of The Hyperacusis and Misophonia Book, discussed in a Hyperacusis Central interview: “Different people have different susceptibilities to different disorders, and of course that includes loudness hyperacusis, pain hyperacusis, tinnitus, hearing loss, etc. Some people have ‘tough ears’ while others have more sensitive ears that are vulnerable to being damaged. I think genetics would have to play the major role in why people have different susceptibilities” [Rider, 2025].).

My tinnitus wasn’t reactive to everyday sounds—meaning noise didn’t worsen it—and therefore it didn’t interfere with life’s activities. My concerns about my new companion eventually abated with habituation, meaning the tinnitus was pushed into the background so I could ignore it.

2003 was a game changer, though. One day I was walking through a hallway at my high school. I remember how the sunlight streaming through the doors was beautiful but blinding, and when a student opened one it sounded like a high-pitched cry, a squeal suggesting that its hinge was in need of WD-40. It was loud and hurt. It felt like someone had jammed a knife into my left ear, perforating my eardrum (nothing happened to my right ear). Common sense insisted that the sound was not a threat. I’d heard it many times and no assaults had followed, no deafening sensations. And yet that didn’t matter; with every opened door the stimuli persisted—and all the doors squealed! The pain was instant, not delayed. (Pain hyperacusis sufferers often report that pain can manifest hours after being exposed to sounds, and sometimes even longer, and last for hours, days, or weeks. Not for me, however. As soon as a sound concluded, so did the pain.)

I learned to hate these doors because I couldn’t get away from them. Unless I wanted to walk to the other side of the building and circle back to where the buses were, which I didn’t, because I had to beat the bell. Such an undertaking would have increased the chances of being late and getting a detention. So I powered through the doors and noticed the more I did the worse my symptoms became: pain with higher pitches, like people yelling, clanking silverware, and dump trucks picking up garbage, which happened outside the cafeteria during lunch period. Then the bells followed. It was shocking that after seventeen years of coexisting peacefully with omnipresent sounds, the amity was no more. War had been declared. This chasm was a kind of disruption that’s hard to understand unless it’s you it happens to. Nothing can prepare you for this. Nothing.

Of course by this point I thought of my former stepdad, but didn’t want to believe the connection because I had seen his issues firsthand and knew how bad they were. And I was worried that this would be permanent. I scoured the Internet, typing Sounds causing pain and loud perception into a search engine. That led me to a little-known condition called hyperacusis. The first time I saw the “H word” was on a message board for those with the condition (note the word is singular; again, there was no espousing variants). I got to know some of them and they gave advice, explaining that while it was important to be careful, I shouldn’t overprotect my ears from everyday sounds.

That was such a relief considering the school situation. Students were required to go to pep rallies where the marching band’s noise filled the gymnasium, making the crowd cheer. It was thunderous, and so was the indoor cafeteria during lunch periods, with everyone eating and talking. My school was big, having around a thousand students per grade. And lunches could have a couple hundred students. God only knows how loud they must have been: the cooking in the kitchen, the chatter from the staff and the students, and the pizzas, burgers, and Skittles being eaten. It was probably eighty-five or ninety decibels. And one time I recall a food fight breaking out, with peanuts, pretzels, chips, and fries and rebels unleashing hyena laughs. It felt like razor wires running through my ears, a school from Hell itself, and I thought I gotta get the hell outta here.

Thankfully I did. I began an internship program where I ditched my on-site school time by two-thirds, going to two different radio stations. That started my career at the age of eighteen. Shortly after completing one of the internships, I was hired as an assistant operations manager for an agriculture station and a couple news-talk ones. It was impressive to see those production rooms, studios, all the computer screens, and the colorful buttons and pots to adjust the audio levels on the mixing consoles. I was grateful for the chance to work in a profession that brought me joy. And my spirit soared when getting compliments, like the time when Jack Hanna, the famous zookeeper and TV personality, came into the studio to do a voice-over read for a spot, and he said, “You’ve got a good voice for radio. You’d make a good DJ.” I felt I’d found my calling.

Part of my duties included voicing stock reports that aired on twenty stations that carried the Ohio News Network. By then I had graduated high school and my symptoms were increasing, with people’s voices hurting more, water from the shower and the sink, the revving and the muffler sounds from traffic, audio from a phone or a computer, flushing a toilet, etc. The severity level of my symptoms was moderate, not bad enough to restrict me from most of the things I needed to do.

Because of that, I hadn’t sought a doctor. The folks on the hyperacusis message board said it would be futile unless I could find a Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT) practitioner. TRT is a treatment that attempts to retrain the brain to accept the problematic sounds, turning down their volume; the sufferer listens to gentle broadband pink or white noise, and, over time—a year or two at most—their hearing is rehabilitated. That’s the promise, anyway. The folks on the Net had a list of clinicians but none were near Columbus. I also thought of my former stepdad and told myself that he had kept his job, he continued living. So why couldn’t I? I believed I could, that it would be a challenge and restrict a lot of things, yet I could do it, somehow.

After the onset of my symptoms I continued to expose my ears without enough protection—even to some of the painful sounds, as again, the message-board people had said I shouldn’t overprotect with normal sounds—It could make things worse! they asserted. And there were things I couldn’t control: people talking and how their voices would go from soft to grating in an instant when they laughed or shifted in pitch, and the same thing happened with other sounds: my beloved cockatiel, my family’s German Shepherd and Collie (it was hard to be ripped from the animals), trains in the distance, planes flying over. Since earplugs made it hard to hear people talking, I didn’t wear them much.

An especially jarring moment in my hyperacusis journey occurred when the cockatiel I mentioned passed away. My ears were so sensitive to his chirping that we moved him upstairs. Hyperacusis prevented us from having contact while he was alive; it destroyed our peaceful coexistence, just as it ruins relationships between parents and children. It’s a condition that’s antagonistic toward relationships—dehumanizing. But I’d hoped that someday I’d heal and rekindle our connection. That was wishful thinking. I stood there motionless, looking at his body at the bottom of the cage, his feathers fluffed up and his feet tucked under him. He lay on his side and was stiff to the touch. Tears trickled down my cheeks. It dawned on me that this was the only way I’d ever see him again, and it crushed me that he may have never understood why I had disappeared.

Throughout my journey, I underestimated hyperacusis quite a bit. I went to a restaurant that ended up being loud, which worsened my condition. The instructions from the teachers online had been terribly misguided. Therefore it wasn’t totally my fault. I didn’t know that exposures to sounds would be like throwing a burning match on a pile of brush whose every stick is drenched in gasoline. Plus I used what I thought was common sense. Dude, I told myself, you’ve dealt with sounds your whole life. Everyone exposes their ears to them. It was hard to surrender to my mutant quality. I was a stubborn teen who wanted freedom and time with my family and friends. (What teen doesn’t?)

I was never one to go to concerts, clubs, or blast music in the car. I went to one club in my life and one Christmas concert before tinnitus and hyperacusis came. I even avoided risky medications because I was a health nut, into bodybuilding, and chose the natural route when something made me sick. Yet my safety went unrewarded.

By 2005, my once-stable tinnitus was now reactive, meaning exposing my ears to normal sounds without adequate ear protection made it intensify. I learned how bad my symptoms had become when I was in my living room and felt discomfort from the distant hum of rush-hour traffic, the lawn equipment from neighbors, the rattling calls of blue jays, the whistles and trills of cardinals, the flutelike sounds of robins, the planes flying over, the distant train blaring its horn, the kids next door dribbling a basketball and shooting hoops, the wind’s whooshing sound! All these things were painful intrusions I couldn’t ignore, loud and stabbing at my ears, even through the walls and closed windows. It was as if they had evolved into three-dimensional stimuli, not just heard but felt. Before this evolution, all these distant sounds were pushed into the background, habituated to. But now they were in the foreground.

My declining hearing made things at work more difficult. Radio is a profession based on sound. It was ironic I had a career where sound was absolute. I had to listen to programs, promos, PSAs, and commercials to dub them in for their later air times; listen to talk-show hosts live on air and feed them cues for commercial breaks; screen phone callers to speak with the hosts over air, and make sure the callers didn’t cuss when it was their turn to talk, dumping them by using the delay equipment if they did; interview stock analysts and talk live for ag reports; etc. And I couldn’t wear headphones feeding audio anymore when talking on air or recording spots (the consoles were set up in such a way that activating a mic would cut the audio from being heard, so you had to wear headphones to hear it). I wanted to cap the environmental sounds as much as possible. That meant turning the knobs on production equipment down so all the speakers wouldn’t blare as loudly as before, which ticked some people off. For them it was inconvenient to fiddle with the knobs when they came in to cut a spot and had to crank them up to get the excessive volume they wanted; for me, however, it was pure survival.

I told some coworkers about my condition since they saw me shielding my ears and wondered what was up. I had been using my fingers to plug my ears, because phones would ring in the studio, or alarms would go off to tell us a station was dead air due to equipment failures—radio’s biggest sin, at the time, next to cussing on the air. I had also decided to share my secret after one guy asked why I messed with the audio settings on a mixing console. I was also looking for support, human decency, and minor accommodations. Well guess what happened then? They made fun of me! They started holding their ears with their index fingers, laughing, and calling me “Super-Hearing One.” The company and managers didn’t know about the bullying; I never reported it.

Outside of work, the lack of understanding and cruelty thrived as well. Some of my friends and family remained skeptical about my condition. This is something common in hyperacusis stories, and Dr. Marsha Johnson—who has a private practice in Portland, Oregon, aptly named the Oregon Tinnitus & Hyperacusis Treatment Clinic, and has treated countless patients since 1997—talked about this subject in an interview with Hyperacusis Research: “Many parents cannot accept that there is something chronically wrong with their child. This is a serious issue, and families sometimes make the situation worse. . . . People have all sorts of hidden conditions, like a migraine, but for some reason, with hyperacusis, others shut down their sympathy” (Hyperacusis Research, 2025).

I felt hurt, depressed, anxious, misunderstood, alone. That I didn’t fit in with the human race. Was small and insignificant. I thought that I mattered and that life had a purpose for me. But my hearing and people’s insensitivity made me doubt that the world was good.

By this point I had seen some doctors too (my GP and an ENT), and, shockingly, even they were skeptical. Many doctors have never heard of hyperacusis or conditions of physical sound intolerance. Hyperacusis Central’s Scientific Advisor Kelly Jahn conducted a survey that was published by Hyperacusis Research. It showed that even audiologists only get five or less hours of training for hyperacusis (Jahn, Cohen, Llodra, 2025). And as I said before, hyperacusis is so hopelessly rare that ENTs can go decades without meeting a patient claiming to have it. The aforementioned Dr. Henry served as a research audiologist, and explained in an interview with Hyperacusis Central that, even over nearly four decades, he’d only met a single patient who had hyperacusis (Rider, 2025). And Henry himself has had loudness hyperacusis since the ‘90s. Therefore Dr. Henry would have been especially attuned to his patients’ symptoms if they were describing them as sound intolerance, and issued diagnoses of hyperacusis for them.

Hyperacusis had shown me a side of the world I didn’t want to see, and I was disgusted with it all. People looked at me like I was crazy. I remembered how I had looked at my former stepdad and wondered if I was like that too. I thought I had tried to help him by turning down the sounds. I admit, at the time, that his issues seemed far-fetched, since I hadn’t had those problems in my own life yet, and wouldn’t for a long time. I was empathetic, though.

But one of the hardest things I’ve learned in life relates to empathy, which often only happens through a shared experience—people facing the same dilemmas. Incomprehension results in apathy. It even leads to disbelief, rejection and disposal, and heartache for the person yearning to be understood. Those with disabilities—especially when invisible, such as sound intolerance—will learn this rather quickly: compassion is in short supply.

I think it’s easier for people to believe this unheard-of “hyperacusis” is just a mental illness, as that is something they can understand. Like schizophrenia. But the rare disabilities—like the ones that confine a person to a tank respirator, a bed because of chronic pain, or a room whose curtains are drawn to ward off migraines from light sensitivity—are foreign to their minds. The collective apathy kind of made me lose hope in humanity. Not losing hope would be inhuman and delusional under such circumstances.

I left radio. When I went to my next job in television—an NBC hub where I served as a broadcast operations controller—I didn’t tell a soul about my disabilities; I knew it wouldn’t go well. I wore earplugs to protect myself and thankfully none of my coworkers noticed those deeply inserted foam cylinders. But I still struggled big time. It was hard to hear people talk at times, both on the phone and in person. Yet since waiving protection would cause extensive pain, I had to wear the plugs. That sometimes led to mistakes, like missing or mishearing cues when rolling commercials or local weather updates for live sports or news events, or botching instructions for playlist changes given during phone calls. Due to these controller errors my supervisor put me on third shift initially, where less responsibilities were handled; overnight was less revenue for programs and commercials, hardly any phone calls, less news events.

That was a blow to my ego, because I knew a healthy me wouldn’t be making frequent mistakes. Being moved to overnight fueled my motivation more to try to get better, and in 2007 I found an audiologist who did believe my claims regarding sound intolerance. She had recently trained under TRT-creator Pawel Jastreboff and offered me the treatment. She was the only clinician in Ohio for TRT and was in my city—lucky me! According to TRT, hyperacusis is not made up of variants (i.e., loudness and pain). Back then, hyperacusis was simply hyperacusis, with four categories ruling one’s severity.

I tried TRT, wearing WNGs (white noise generators), which looked like hearing aids, with the doctor’s promise that they could retrain my brain to tolerate the soundscape. But I could never tell if they were helping or if I was improving naturally, which often happens with hyperacusis patients. I also half-assed wearing my generators and wasn’t as dedicated as I could have been. Part of that was because I wasn’t sure if they were what was best for my ears; I didn’t want to worsen, and sometimes I’d have setbacks and didn’t know if I should blame the generators.

As the year progressed, my audiologist instructed me to stop protecting my ears so much. I did, and after three long years of moderate hearing symptoms, I became mild. Sounds that had been harsh were normal once again. Thank God! It was like a miracle. Not a cure but close. All I had to do was protect from sounds above eighty-five decibels; otherwise I’d start to feel pain. Even my tinnitus calmed and stopped being reactive as long as I didn’t exceed my threshold of tolerance. It was a momentous victory, as most sounds in my life were well below eighty-five.

The victory reminded me of Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption—the scene where he crawls through the shit and escapes prison. I escaped as well, and getting out was everything you’d imagine a rebirth should be: laughing and conversing; hearing singing birds and barks from wound-up dogs; leaving home without torture by my side when driving or grocery shopping; a better job performance, where my boss saw the talent that hyperacusis had been suppressing and put me on the shift where the hardest tasks were handled—primetime—because of frequent breaking news, higher ad revenue, and playlist editing.

This newfound freedom didn’t go unchallenged over the next seven years; I had occasional flares. The worst occurred in 2016. I had gotten my body to look like a muscular G.I. Joe from working out, but deadlifts and other heavy lifting expedited degenerative disc disease (which ran in my family; three of my lumbar discs were bulging and one was cracked, according to an MRI). Several months after finding that out and getting no improvement pain-wise, I bought an inversion table to decompress my back. I inverted at an angle of sixty degrees for ten to fifteen minutes daily. After a week my hyperacusis symptoms in my left ear climbed to moderate, and were just as bad as they were in 2007. I was devastated. How could inverting on the table do such a thing? (The pressure must have affected the middle ear.) I beat myself up for a while, but eventually realized that there was no way I could have foreseen this (even a search on the Internet didn’t grant the information of a victim like so). It was just bizarre.

Yet since I had recovered in the past, I was optimistic that with patience and careful measures I would be okay. And thank God that that was true. It took two months for my symptoms to abate. I avoided painful sounds and protected my ears with earplugs, but also allowed some sound exposures. A balance, just like last time. I wasn’t sure which approach had helped, and sort of thought that maybe including both had done the trick.

Five years passed without incident, unless you want to call the usual bullshit that milder hyperacusis and tinnitus threw on my life as “incidents.” Since I never completely healed, I had to continue lugging these conditions around, which were still hard to carry in some situations. They affected my social and romantic lives. I tried to date but sometimes strained to hear the women talking when wearing earplugs. I couldn’t remove them in noisy environments: restaurants, movie theaters, going to the zoo, etc. And musicians’ earplugs didn’t work for me, as noise still crept in, triggered stabbing pain, and spikes of tinnitus. Dates were therefore ruined. In a healthy universe, who knows if I would have bonded with these women? Even when I got a girlfriend, my symptoms made a healthy relationship hard to sustain.

A couple of my girlfriends wondered why I sometimes pulled away in intimate situations, like kissing. I did because their talking or laughing at such a close range—lips to lips or nose to nose, or even when they rested their head on my chest—activated pain. I didn’t have my earplugs in because we were at home. I had to be able to hear them talk. I told them about my hearing conditions, of course, but they didn’t understand. Hindsight tells me that in part these relationships failed because of my ears.

Nonetheless things were going great in 2021. Even though my NBC job had ended in 2020 because the company moved their hub to Spartanburg, South Carolina. I opted to stay in Ohio with my family and started working at a real estate firm. I worked from home with a team of others who did as well, and we were in charge of keeping the facility needs in order (like HVAC, plumbing, lighting, furniture, etc.) for the businesses the company partnered with. We’d talk to each location to pinpoint their problems, and draw up work orders to dispatch technicians. My supervisors were overjoyed with my performance, and I was close to getting a leadership promotion. It wouldn’t happen, though. I’d have to quit eventually when phone calls, virtual meetings, and every task that depended on sound brought excruciating pain.

My downfall started when I took a pain-relieving herb called turmeric for sciatica (back and leg pain relating to my discs, so I could barely sit, and suffered cramps that stretched from my lumbar region to my knees when standing still and walking). I thought turmeric would be safe. Especially since other hyperacusis sufferers who had used it without issues said it would be.

After six days of taking a normal dose, my left ear made a popping sound and my tinnitus got louder for thirty seconds. (This popping or snapping sensation has often been noted in hyperacusis stories and might be the tensor tympani muscle “breaking.”) The next morning, my mild pain and loudness symptoms to sounds became high moderate, bordering severe—worse than 2007 and 2016. My loudness discomfort levels (LDLs) were at forty-five decibels instead of eighty-five, and a new Morse code tinnitus tone emerged. Voices were hurting again and water from the sink—all the familiar hells, but more painful than before. How could a stupid herb destroy my life?

People are often skeptical about my claim that turmeric could cause this worsening, but on the Internet, you can find anecdotal stories by a lot of people who report this. Why this herb can hurt some people might relate to why those acne pads had hurt me decades prior: salicylic acid, which turmeric is high in.

As I previously mentioned, not understanding that hyperacusis has variants would dictate the outcome of my efforts. The word “hyperacusis,” or more specifically, the people using that word, would ultimately trick me—that simple yet complicated “H word” loaded with deception, the key to my undoing. I’d never heard of loudness hyperacusis and pain hyperacusis. Never noxacusis, another name for “pain H.” My panic made me desperate, as I was under a lot of stress from my job. Being a go-getter and wanting to get my hearing back as soon as possible made me incautious, because my new painful symptoms were interfering with my job. I had to make a lot of phone calls and they hurt.

So I once again turned to a group composed of hyperacusis sufferers online. They didn’t acknowledge that pain and loudness were separate conditions, and went one step further by saying that sound exposures were critical to improve, criticizing people who challenged that. Being naive like I was and thinking of my history with TRT, I took their word for it.

The head of the group suggested I try pink-noise therapy with open-ear headphones so they wouldn’t block my ears from hearing other sounds. Because I had done my half-assed version of TRT, I still had my white noise generators but they had broken. I tried to get new ones from my former doctor, but she said they didn’t use them anymore. Their new procedure called for apps, earbuds, or headphones. So since her advice aligned with the online people’s, I opted for the headphones.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was never sure if TRT aided in my first recovery. As the years went on, I even considered that the reason I had never healed completely from hyperacusis was because I had half-assed TRT. The group online agreed, which strengthened my confidence. I mused: What’s the risk, right? I got my history and support team in agreement. Yet my gut was saying Cool it, bro. Wait it out and see if you improve naturally. I didn’t heed the fear. I was stupid and impatient.

I listened to pink noise for four days, an hour for each session. It was at whisper levels and didn’t hurt or feel weird. Nevertheless by day four my tinnitus exploded with a permanent loud reactive hum. My pain and loudness symptoms increased as well. I was inconsolable, telling myself You jumped the gun and didn’t listen to your gut! Yeah, pretty much. Had I been patient and tried to wait it out, perhaps my symptoms would have reduced to mild again. I’ll never know.

I ran a search online and found that headphones—even open ear—are much more dangerous than WNGs because of their sound quality being harsh, per a thread on a popular tinnitus website where several victims of headphones expressed agreement with the original poster. So I had badly injured myself on top of my previous injury (the turmeric), which had never happened in my hyperacusis history; I had only had setbacks.

I joined other hyperacusis communities and learned that pain and loudness are separate conditions, and for pain, sufferers often find that avoiding painful sounds is critical, which is the reason Dr. Henry stressed that it’s imperative to recognize hyperacusis is not one condition; a proper diagnosis ensures the appropriate care and treatment paths are taken (Henry, The Hyperacusis and Misophonia Book, 2025).

Besides firsthand accounts from patients, modern medical studies have recognized that TRT and noise-exposure therapies have been harmful due to hyperacusis being treated as a single disorder. Loudness hyperacusis is more likely to improve with careful exposures to sound, while pain hyperacusis is normally the opposite, where retreating to silence is of the utmost importance, preserving what hearing you have, because what you lose may never be returned.

This enlightenment crushed my heart and made me furious, since these people online had given dangerous advice and injured my life, maybe beyond repair. I later learned that they knew of the variants, but dismissed the medical literature espousing different treatment approaches for each. So these idiots knew the risks! I bemoaned. It dawned on me that I would have been better off had I never used the Internet for hyperacusis research; in all my years it had only attracted bad advice, injuries, and heartache. These online self-proclaimed experts are able to mislead the masses because these hearing conditions aren’t respected or researched extensively by the medical establishment. Stubborn and desperate people take matters into their own hands, sometimes coming face to face with horrifying outcomes. People become their own doctors, own experts, roll the dice to play, but often lose the game.

What ended up happening next is something I always feared would happen: I got an unrelated illness—two infected ulcers on my legs; pus-filled bloody pits that would make me square off with antibiotics (risky because they’re usually ototoxic). Already I was almost housebound due to my symptoms, and I’d say that they were high moderate (not severe yet, knowing what I know now, but they seemed severe). Leaving home was hard, even with earplugs and earmuffs. Yet the pain from the ulcers and the worry of what could happen with untreated infections (sepsis and lying in a hospital with a tube feeding intravenous antibiotics) pushed me into going to my general practitioner, who said I should go to the emergency room since both infections looked extreme. So I did go, and even though I wore earplugs and earmuffs the pain from certain sounds persisted: people’s voices, the automatic sliding doors at the hospital, beeping tones, elevators.

The looks I received in the waiting room brought sordid flashbacks of what I had dealt with in 2007 and 2016: This guy must be nuts. Indeed a person donning bulky red earmuffs in public is unusual to encounter. I remember thinking how people’s expressions seemed to indicate that they were perturbed by the sight. Yes. I was different, but that was unacceptable!

I underwent a couple tests to try to figure out what caused the ulcers: a CT scan and ultrasound, which checked for blood clots. Despite their noise, both were doable, with the scan producing a whir and series of shifting lights, and the ultrasound being louder and having a warble to it. Neither test explained the reason for the ulcers. The doctor then said that while it didn’t seem the ulcers were infected—contradicting my GP’s diagnosis, not to mention my own —I should take doxycycline just in case, an antibiotic known as ototoxic. I said I couldn’t take the drug due to my ears. The doctor said my reaction was based on fear. He had never heard of hyperacusis. ER doctors are used to seeing people who hallucinate or get defined as crazy, so it was easy to get lumped into that category. God only knows how many patients facing rare health conditions meet that same response when going to the ER. Probably a lot.

I had to say no to the antibiotic, and here’s the thing—which is something that people cannot grasp unless they’re victims of hyperacusis—when your ears are flirting with catastrophic symptoms, one wrong move can make them catastrophic, which happens to a lot of sufferers. Your ears have to take precedence over everything because your quality of life is defined by them. So, screwing yourself with an antibiotic is life-destroying beyond what was already life-destroying. The risk isn’t worth it. Dying would be better. That may shock some readers, but you can’t understand unless you’ve been here. In my whole life, I never had suicidal ideation (even though I had dealt with traumas stemming from obsessive compulsive disorder, pain and loudness hyperacusis that were moderate, reactive tinnitus, and those awful lumbar issues) until these ear conditions bordered on catastrophic and I lost everything. Literally everything. Like the biblical Job, who also had suicidal ideation. Having ideation is not because of weakness. It’s a human response to a physical, sacrificial upheaval that is insurmountable. It is my Christian faith and family that keep me holding on, and my hope—however small—that my symptoms could improve, as they did twice before.

The doctor continued pressuring me to take the doxycycline. Refusing it prompted the nurse to roll her eyes and the doctor to silently wear a look of hopeless exasperation. But I stood my ground and decided safe alternatives would be better. I felt like I had to try something, because those chances of sepsis and a lengthy stay in the hospital were probable. Online I found a remedy that was supposed to be safe and help clear up infections (topical tea tree oil and topical colloidal silver). It was suggested by other tinnitus and hyperacusis sufferers.

But they weren’t safe for me. Tea tree tanked my loudness discomfort levels from forty-five decibels to thirty, and my tinnitus became multitonal with sounds that resembled jingle bells, someone demonically playing an untuned accordion, and a weird zipping sound. The colloidal silver gel made me dip to zero-decibel LDLs (meaning every sound became intolerable, bringing instant pain, but never delayed), and my tinnitus became more reactive and very severe, with static sounds and electrical zapping that produced a shock sensation deep in my ears every fifteen to thirty seconds. This cacophony grew louder and more aggressive if I didn’t flee to silence. The silver lining was that the infections went away; the treatments had worked. But now I had injured myself a third time (with turmeric and the headphones number one and two) before my ears could have a chance to “heal” to milder symptoms like they had in the past.

This, I believe, is why I was introduced to the “catastrophic” realm—too much shit had happened, the damage too severe, and my state is now chronic. What is catastrophic? It’s when you can’t meet life’s necessities. For example, even with earplugs and earmuffs, your symptoms are worsened significantly, often permanently, by things as simple as brushing your teeth or bathing. Layer after layer of dead skin and oil serves as a mockery of your inhuman scale of suffering. Forget cooking and talking. Even whispering. I haven’t uttered a word for years. I can’t leave home without further wrecking my ears. Pain comes from bassy and high-pitched noises a quarter mile down the road; sometimes further, shockingly. Even when wearing muffs and plugs, the noise of neighbors mowing grass is torturous. In suburbia, where one hundred homes are within earshot, it’s like the cutters are on a conveyor belt. Their oscillating low-pitched frequencies inflict the sensation of my ears being pulled, as if in a bid to rip them apart, whereas the mid- and high-pitched sounds are knife-like in experience. Others in my situation say their hells are similar. Everything is undone. All that remains is torture entangled with slavery, the round-the-clock dread and existential crisis that come from losing everything.

Things have gotten so bad that I can’t inhale deeply without pain; the same with coughing, sneezing, and blowing my nose. I was forced to part with a lot of the foods I like. When sinking my teeth into tough beef and chicken, and feeling stabs of pain, I crossed them off my can-do list and turned to soggy cereal. Yet Raisin Bran showed me the error of my ways, since even the crunches of the wheat flakes made my symptoms worsen. Potato chips were axed, and pretzels and tortilla chips. So were the crispy and deep-dish pizzas whose high-pitched “SNAPS!” when eating them were too much to withstand without a major setback. The same with popcorn, seeds, and peanuts. These days I eat yogurt and bananas, or creamy/soft alternatives. I can’t use a microwave and oven since their beeps are too malicious. I can eat fish, rice, and oatmeal, which all require cooking. Thankfully my mom is empathetic and prepares my meals daily. I got rid of my apartment and live with her. When I’m alone someday, I’ll be forced to eat foods that don’t require cooking.

I’m grateful that my parents help with the tasks I can’t complete, like grocery shopping, handyman projects around the house, flushing toilets, making phone calls, maintaining my cars, etc. Having a supportive family or group of friends is crucial when you’re in an existential crisis.

My parents are also helping me to secure disability benefits. I have a diagnosis from my doctor, but based on what I’ve read and heard from other sufferers, the system may require traveling to other doctors for further testing or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to ensure I have exhausted all the available treatment options (to see if something like a tumor is causing my hearing impairments, or to see if CBT—which would not be achievable anyway, since pain is caused by talking—could will them all away. What the system doesn’t understand or fails to respect is some disabled people cannot leave their houses, as doing so will permanently worsen them. Basically they’re too disabled to hunt for help or try to see a doctor! Isn’t that ridiculous? The car rides themselves are too much.

My story has hope and terror intersecting. It shows these disabilities can improve, and how simple mistakes can dig a hole that’s too deep to climb out of. It shows how the different stages affected my quality of life—mild and moderate tagging along in life, letting me coexist with sounds, and severe and catastrophic forcing my captivity. I’m a tortured pariah of the highest order known. Every day is pure survival now, and as I write this, I haven’t left my house since May of 2022—over three years. Last time I did I paid the price with a physical wounding of permanence (my right ear’s tinnitus increased its electrical zapping, and my pain and loudness hyperacusis increased despite using hearing protection). Ironically, it happened when I went to Ohio’s leading tinnitus and hyperacusis specialist to be diagnosed with tinnitus, loudness hyperacusis, and pain hyperacusis, and to ascertain whether anything could help them. Nothing could, of course. But I got my conditions documented, which was needed for the pursuit of disability benefits.

So that worsening revealed I couldn’t leave my house anymore. It was crushing to accept such limitations. Remember how people reacted to the COVID-19 lockdowns? Imagine doing that for the rest of your life with aural torture on top of it. And never seeing people. Besides my mom, dad, and brother, the only stranger I’ve seen since 2022 was a TV repairman who wrote notes to accommodate my condition.

Even at home these ear conditions leave nothing untouched. I’m sedentary and my sleep is lousy. I’ll doze a couple hours at night and then I’ll get so tired during the day I can’t do anything. I’ll fall asleep standing up and have to take a nap. That complicates my sleeping schedule further. And I can’t use sleeping pills because I’m sensitive to ototoxic meds. So it’s a vicious circle.

The act of sleeping is also problematic. I can’t lie down and doze unless the environment is quiet. Even in the windowless bathroom that serves as my usual sleeping spot, I cannot sleep if it’s raining, windy, or people are cutting grass, because I can’t wear earplugs or earmuffs while lying on my back since my breathing and snoring cause occlusion pain that rouses me awake (occlusion is where the sounds are louder in your head when wearing ear protection). If I sit in a chair and hang my head forward while sleeping, my breathing and snoring are muted. I can use hearing protection if I sleep in such a way, but it’s pretty uncomfortable.

Nothing new occurred until 2023, when I met a member of a Facebook hyperacusis group. Her golden hair and blue-green eyes with specks of brown in them were very hypnotizing. We texted, noticed how much we had in common, and she became my girlfriend despite the distance between us: two thousand two hundred thirty-nine miles since she was on the opposite end of the USA.

Although she was thirty-two, her health had started to decline a decade prior when a rollercoaster gave her whiplash and a bad concussion, along with tinnitus and photophobia, where normal lights are not just bright but very painful too (burning/aching symptoms)—basically the equivalent of loudness hyperacusis and pain hyperacusis for the eyes. And she had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, only to find she couldn’t work. At the time of her injury, she had a slew of goals: marriage, kids, a great career that would help protect the environment, traveling the world. She loved to scuba dive, and her drive for exploration wasn’t to be quenched. So when her disabilities condemned her to a homebound life, she was devastated. We told each other that we could get better and meet eventually, that we could get married and travel to England and stay in one of those peaceful country villages you see on television, explore the castles and picturesque greenery of Ireland, and scratch our seafaring itches by taking a cruise to the Caribbean. Our greatest hope was to meet in person, though. Well fate had other plans.

Her hearing and vision symptoms increased, and she also developed a neuropathic condition where her skin would hurt when wearing clothes (possibly allodynia; she wasn’t diagnosed). She said her family had always been leery of her health conditions. (Especially when an ignorant doctor said: “Hyperacusis shouldn’t be acknowledged as real.”) So when they saw her worsening, they thought she was giving into fear and took away part of her hearing and eye protection, hoping to snap her out of what was construed as self-imprisonment and conquerable dilemmas. Of course this didn’t work; her symptoms escalated. This shift of circumstances—something she had prophesied but hoped would never happen—convinced her that the prophecy was right and underway, that things would always crumble, that her and I uniting was exceedingly unlikely, because our disabilities denied us traveling, and that a future free of pain was far from realistic. She never said goodbye, and her funeral followed a week later.

The shock of her death was paralyzing, impossible to accept for quite a long time. I wrestled with the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), with anger being the hardest to defeat because an incompetent doctor and apathetic treatment lent to her demise. I understand why she took her life and feel compassion for her. Her prison was so inhumane that anyone with empathy would get what she was up against. I’ll always remember how precious she was; my love for her will never die.

Ironically, 2024 brought photophobia for me as well. It started without warning (although I’d had mild VSS [visual snow syndrome] for years, where everything is grainy, my eyes were in good shape). As you would expect, I was shocked and scared by this development, knowing how bad it had been for my late girlfriend. It also seemed ironic to get the same disorder as her (reminding me of the coincidence or fated connection my former stepdad and I had had) until I researched photophobia further and found it is a somewhat common comorbid condition of hyperacusis. I think photophobia is a stupid medical name for something physical, and hate to call it that, but . . . the medical world has run with it.

Like hyperacusis’s variance to sounds, based on frequencies, photophobia is equally complex, depending on the type of light. A lot of my eye pain is instant stabbing. I haven’t been out in the sun in almost two years. Many photophobia sufferers say sunshine is the hardest light to handle; they can’t expose to it, or if they can they need major eye protection (welding goggles). The pain I get is not just from the sun but normal lights too. When I venture from a dark room to a lighter one my eyes take long to readjust. I ease into the light, giving my sight a few minutes to recalibrate. If I don’t I’ll feel pain—stabbing, burning, blistering—and it will cause a setback, where even reading a book causes pain, and almost all light. When this happens, I have to stay in darker environments until my eyes improve (it’s almost like prison’s solitary confinement), which can take several days. Even at their best nowadays, my eyes are never close to the level of tolerance a healthy person has.

Reflections are really painful. If I look at a cellphone’s face and turn it, the light from the room will move across its surface, causing instant stabbing pain. This happens with books whose covers are glossy, plates and silverware, and anything reflecting light. Exposing too much invites prolonged burning/aching pain and lower tolerance, like headaches in the eyeballs (and the risk of setbacks). The same occurs with dry eyes. So I keep them moisturized.

I have to keep the TV and my phone on their lowest brightness settings. Sometimes I can’t even watch the screens, because the darkness forbids me from seeing what they’re showing. And bright and fast-paced images will trigger nausea (programs like The Prince is Right and certain action films). My e-ink tablet helps a bit. And blue-light-blocking glasses diminish the irritating glare screens have.

As I reflect on my story, it’s daunting to think about the future and the things I haven’t written yet. I turned forty in November 2025. I don’t feel forty. On the one hand, I feel like I’m still a young adult, because in some ways I never fulfilled my deepest desires prior to getting these disabilities that cut me off from ninety-nine percent of existence by the time I was thirty-six. So my heart and mind are constantly attracted to my uncompleted goals; they mourn what is forbidden.

When growing up, we’re conditioned to think that certain things will happen: the things society teaches should happen—marriage, kids, and raising them, and building careers into our sixties until we retire. Courting risks with hopes. Bringing passions from mind to paper to matter. Health can challenge all of that. Especially the catastrophic illnesses. You become a slave to them, your every breath a measure of belonging.

In another sense, I feel one hundred instead of forty, because enslavement and suffering instill a lot of wisdom, the things our elders could only hope to avoid as the sorrows of time are administered. The worst of the darkness is not just a sight but a taste, a grasp of knowledge from above, bringing inflammation. Understanding people’s hearts and how the world ticks. I’m tasked with enduring the pain of God—all the hells He knows are true but most are spared from seeing. From hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, feeling and living. Darkness’s enlightenment.

Assuming I live the lifespan of most I’m halfway done with life. Only halfway! Given the above, that’s pretty terrifying. Forty years to go, yet I’ll take them as I must: one day at a time. The minutes and hours rely on my grit as my hearing and vision hold my living conditions taut, and further tighten their grips as the future unfolds.

God bless. If your health is good, value it—it’s the key to livelihood. And remember how precious existing is. Love your family, friends, and pray for your enemies. Have hope the lost will find their way. Volunteer work occupies a lot of my time these days because I’m the president of Hyperacusis Central (I was recruited by the team, and I thank them for trusting my leadership); I’ll continue raising awareness the best I can. In the meantime I want to ask for prayers for hyperacusis, tinnitus, VSS, and photophobia research, treatments, and cures.

Time is short on Earth, but living is eternal, I believe. Plan your life with that in mind. If I didn’t think that Jesus Christ were real—the Son of God and Savior of the world—then life would lack a purpose. There’d be no second chance, and what was lost could never be reclaimed. Christ is strength, offers hope, and keeps me holding on. Thanks for reading my story.

*AI wasn’t used to write or edit this story.

References

1. Interview with Marsha Johnson, Au.D. “A toothache in your ear — the pain is severe and incapacitating”. Hyperacusis Research (hyperacusisresearch.org). 2025.
2. Rider JD. An Interview With James A. Henry, PhD, Author of The Hyperacusis and Misophonia Book. Hyperacusis Central (hyperacusiscentral.org). 2025.
3. Jahn KN, Cohen J, Llodra O. What patients say and what audiologists say. Hyperacusis Research (hyperacusisresearch.org). 2025.
4. Henry JA. The Hyperacusis and Misophonia Book. Ears Gone Wrong, LLC; 2025.

Disclaimer

If you’re suffering from suicidal thoughts, you’re not alone. You can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also chat with 988lifeline.org. Or text MHA to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. Or, for a comprehensive list pertaining to different countries, visit the following link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines.