Don't let tinnitus ring your bell

 

I want you to listen to me very carefully. What I have to say is incredibly important. Protect your hearing while you can!

This message is vitally important to children and young adults who don’t think twice about shoving earbuds into their ears and cranking up the music or going to a concert or sporting event where the noise volume reaches unhealthy levels.

When I was a teenager, I took up small game hunting with my single-shot shotgun. My buddies and I were out on weekends and sometimes after school hunting ducks, geese, pheasants, rabbits, doves, etc. Sometimes we’d go down by the junk pile in the creek and take target practice at the trash.

I came home after each outing with a ringing sound in my ears. It would usually clear up after a while, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. Eventually, the recovery time got longer and longer. At some time after I turned 16, the ringing continued and never stopped. To this day, 43 years later, it continues and has only gotten worse.

The condition is known at tinnitus. It’s a phantom sound that no one else can hear. I’ve been told that I damaged the hair-like follicles in my inner ear that detect soundwaves and transmit them to my brain. Apparently, the brain creates its own sound to compensate for the sound it isn’t receiving from the damaged follicles. These follicles don’t heal or grow back and the ringing never stops – ever! It’s there when I go to sleep and it’s the first thing I hear when I wake up.

In my late teens and early 20s I frequently contemplated suicide just to make the ringing stop. It drove me insane. I eventually grew accustomed to it and learned to tune it out. It became background noise and was almost like another normal bodily function. I didn’t like it, but what choice did I have?

Most of the time it was a soft sound, but it would occasionally flare up and the sound would be loud for a few hours or a day or two. I got into the habit of carrying foam earplugs with me and using them whenever I was around loud sounds. That worked pretty well.

Unfortunately, all of that changed when I moved to Brazos County in 2023. The property we bought had a few dead trees on it, so I bought a chainsaw and started cutting them down and cutting them up. I wore the foam earplugs, but that was not enough protection.

The ringing in my ears got much louder and has not relented. For nearly two years now I have been nearly deafened by the loud ringing. It got to the point where I was having difficulty hearing some sounds and understanding what people were saying. It wasn’t a question of the speaker being loud enough, but rather clear enough for me to understand.

I finally went to an audiologist last fall and had my hearing checked. I was right, I had more hearing loss in the same pattern I had before.

I ended up getting hearing aids. This has been a mixed blessing. They have helped improve my hearing. I can now hear sounds that I have not heard in decades, if ever. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble adapting to them. I frequently hear things with a kind of tinny sound to them. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the increased and focused sound projected into my ears may be worsening my tinnitus.

My point is that this is totally preventable. No one else should suffer like this. Keep the volume turned down in your earbuds. Don’t crank the stereo in your car. Use earplugs if you’re going to be around loud and/or prolonged noise, such as a concert, sporting event, guns, power tools, etc.

The audiologists I have seen strongly recommend using hearing protection for sounds above 85 decibels. For reference, normal conversation is around 60 decibels. A lawn mower is about 90, earbuds/headphones at maximum volume is about 105, concerts are about 120, and fireworks range from 140-160.

If there is any good to come from my misery, I hope that it will be a warning to others to protect your hearing. Trust me, you don’t want tinnitus constantly ringing your bell. It’s no fun.