Do you hear that ringing?

That'll be my Tinnitus. Here's how I've learned to live with it for 30 years.

Photo by Shaouraav Sarose Shreshtha on Unsplash

It’s not the end of the world by any stretch, but every so often I do feel a bit dismayed that I will never, in my life, know the sound of silence.

I must have known it at some stage, waaaaaaay back in my youth. My early teens. But right now, as I type this in my quiet house, my ears are screaming their constant little song.

Tinnitus: for me it’s a mix of that ringing you get in your ears for a few hours after you’ve been to a loud concert, together with another high pitched piercing sound that sits in there with it. At night, when I’m lying on my side in bed, I hear a dull, almost musical sound of two notes. Think the ‘wee-aw’ sound of an ambulance siren but much lower register, like a fog horn. That’s new. For a few weeks I thought it was a new generator or exhaust fan in the big bakery that’s right behind our house. It was only when I was away from home for a night, and I could still hear the two-note wee-aw, that I realised that my ears had dropped a whole new track.

Through my teens and early 20s, I think I’d honestly thought everyone had constant ringing in their ears. I only read the word ‘tinnitus’ in some newspaper piece in my mid-20s. In those days I was a raging hypochondriac, my anxious brain always on the lookout for the next big illness to be freaking out about. (‘Gotta be gettin’ somethin’’, Ross used to sing at me, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’.)

Reading in black and white that I had ‘a thing’ made me a bajillion times more conscious of it and, just like that, it was driving me crazy. Like, genuinely insane. The noise in my head took over my life. When I wasn’t lying in bed quietly tearing up about it as it now kept me awake, I was reading everything about it I could get my hands on. The obsession drove the anxiety as I kept reading that really, you just have to learn to live with it. Nothing to be done. There was about a month where I lost all rational thought and wondered how anyone could possibly learn to just put up with it.

A doctor told me I would need to ‘train’ myself to, and that sent me spiralling even more. He could send me to therapy sessions or suggest audio tapes to mask the sounds, but it was going to be an exercise in mind over matter. I was outraged that there was no magic pill to fix this.

After a few weeks, I became exhausted enough from the despair to finally calm down and realise: The doctor’s right, I am living with this now. Best figure out how.

It did feel impossible in the early panicked days. But as infuriating as it is to be told to just get on with it, it can be done. Daily life is not so bad. When I’m running around living my life, having meetings, doing my work, meeting people, jumping on and off the tube, I ‘forget’ to hear it. The ringing and screaming and buzzing from within can’t really compete with the same from London.

It’s silence that is much tougher, and of course that's what you generally want when you’re lying in bed trying to sleep. Drowning out the screaming buzz at that point is more challenging. Meditation has helped - Headspace is the classic everyone recommends for a reason. But really any apps with a calming voice are great, because I can focus on that, which dominates over the noise coming from my own ears. And I think I’ve mentioned before I search for either ‘theta waves’ or ‘binaural beats’ on Apple music, which gives my ears something pleasant to prioritise as I try to drift off to sleep. It generally works.

I don’t know why I have it. I think it’s the cumulative effect of the abuse I inflicted on my ears in my youth. Screaming at George Michael or Prince or INXS along with 15,000 others at Sydney gigs. Or regularly cranking up my Sony Walkman headphones to two points above the sound barrier. The only damaging incident I can remember was years into all this. I was 45 and on a Glamour shoot. I was standing next to a big speaker when the photographer put his music on and I got a full point-blank blast of decibels. I actually felt it like a massive stab in my right ear and it fully ached for hours after. So that possibly hasn’t helped.

But I’ll tell you what I wasn’t expecting, which is stupid of me: That it would get worse. It had just been what it was for many years, but in the last 12 months, the ringing has gotten louder, and as I mentioned, it has a new element to it. I put it down to the joys of ageing, which is still probably the most likely reason. But as a friend pointed out, seeing as I’ve had tinnitus for decades, maybe there have been some medical developments since the last time I checked.

So I booked an appointment with an ENT specialist.

I have to say, the ringing was incredibly bad by the time I got to this point. I was worried it was a sign of going deaf, because it was starting to interfere with my day to day hearing. Embarrassingly - hilariously - it turns out I actually had an astonishing amount of ear wax impacted in there. Please believe me, I’m not some crusty dirt burger: even the doctor said my ear canal is stupid tiny so the wax doesn’t really have anywhere to go. ‘But there is evidence that you’ve been sticking cotton buds in there,’ he said sternly. ‘I’m saying nothing,’ I said. We all know we’re not supposed to do that, but sometimes it’s just an itch that needs scratching, am I right?

He explained that tinnitus is not a disease in and of itself, but rather a symptom of some underlying issue. He felt certain that giving my ears the mother of all cleans would help a bit.

Miraculously, when he flushed a lot of the gunk out, the ringing did go down a few notches. It’s not fully gone, it never will be. And - I’m dying inside as I tell you this - they couldn’t get all the gunk out in one go. It’s so packed in there!

So I’ll be going back and investigating further. I’ve been putting up with this for a long time assuming there’s nothing I can do, but I’m in the mood to revisit the issue. I’ll let you know how I get on, but also I would love to know of your experiences. It can be such an easy thing to allow to make your life miserable, so I’m sure any tips you have for how you cope with tinnitus will help us all.