Living with tinnitus: no pill for silence

For 20 years, our author has been hearing a noise that isn’t actually there, but is extremely annoying. Really outrageous: the tinnitus.

The silence was my favorite sound. The fact that I haven’t been able to hear them for 20 years is one of the misfortunes in my life that I had to come to terms with, but have never come to terms with: I mourn the pillow-thick evening silence. Lucid summer silence in the countryside. Snow-muted winter night stillness. City silence in the morning at 3:50 am. The silence between the last note of a concert and the applause. The collected and potentized stillness in a group meditation. The sky-high silence in the chapel of a Cistercian monastery in Provence. I remember everyone but I can’t feel them anymore. Because in front of the entrance to the silence my tinnitus roars like a waterfall around which there is no way around it.

From permanent buzz to tinnitus

18 million people in Germany suffer from ringing in their ears at some point in their lives, three million of them chronically – i.e. permanently for more than three months. The trend is increasing, because the triggers stress, noise and excessive demands are increasing and are the basis of the “modern” lifestyle. There is a permanent buzz that you can filter out until you can’t anymore. Because our totally anachronistic auditory nerves are simply not made for the permanent overload of stimuli and information. Ears are always alert, while eyes are good at turning a blind eye to something. In this respect, tinnitus is THE symptomatic disease of our time: There is no cure, at best relief by “not listening”, positively reinterpreting or ignoring the constant alarm. “You have to live with that” – that currently applies to many things. In any case, the environment can also live with it, because the overactivity of the auditory centers in the brain is neither contagious nor externally visible.

But why me? My path to Tinnitussi had not been foreseeable: I always liked the soft tones; was never one to dance in front of the box at concerts. I wasn’t a drummer in a punk band. Avoided firecrackers, guns and fireworks. I only knew this pounding in my head when, as a teenager, I came out of a disco where people had shouted sentences into each other’s ears while dancing and were waiting for the last bus at a bus stop in the nocturnal silence. Then this roar in my ears – like the entry stamp on my hand – was an award. Signs and signs that I had been there. Rock’n’Roll. And just like the stamp, it reliably disappeared again the next day.

But then, when I was in my early 30s and had two small children, day X came when suddenly my left ear began to roar at a high frequency, and a few days later my right ear did too. The full drone quickly developed from this. Not just in the ears, but in the whole head. Like I’m cursed to wear invisible stereo headphones 24/7, which invisible sadists blast at high frequencies. Unfortunately without any party fun in advance and without any other obvious reason. This invisible torture went on day and night – I would say that the legendary sufferings of Tantalus, Sisyphus and Tinnitus have roughly the same torment quotient. Only pointless giant stones to be rolled uphill and eagles, which regularly peck at one’s liver, are visible from the outside and explain why one is not so socially resilient at the moment. But “I hear something you don’t hear”…not exactly a party topic.

You can close your eyes, but not your ears

The official severity rating goes from 1 (compensated, hardly bothers) to 4 (decompensated, normal life and work seems unbearable). The first period of constant noise is particularly terrible and you are powerless. Just like the doctors who said after the physical examination: “It’s not a tumor, sorrryyy … You have to live with that now.” But what is the reason? Embarrassed shrug. Yeah, multicausal: blast trauma, dislocated cervical spine, teeth grinding, cortisol overdose from stress, noisy environment, insomnia, infections… Good luck!

At least once in a while you can buy some relief from pain with a painkiller. There is no pill for silence. Nevertheless, I tried almost everything: aspirin, magnesium, ginkgo. Over the years, I have certainly spent the equivalent of a middle terraced house for alternative glimmers of hope in the form of autohemotherapy, bioresonance procedures, healing hypnosis, homeopathy, acupuncture, dental splints, osteopathy, Reiki, and an indoor fountain. Not only did it drive me insane, it also drove me to the toilet all the time. In our modern times, where artificial hearts are transplanted, tinnitus remains incurable like in the Middle Ages: get used to it. Yes but how? Behavior that helps to minimize the body’s own background noise has been frowned upon for at least a generation: listening away, suppressing, ignoring. If you don’t make it… No pressure!

In any case, silence is contraindicated for tinnitus and “Do yoga, meditate!” in the acute phase probably the shittiest advice. I knew what impotent despair was the moment everyone else lay blissfully in the stillness of their hearts during the meditation while the high-tension wires hummed through my head louder than ever. I was sure you could see my head vibrating from the outside! The ENT doctor recommended that I do a six-week cure in a specialized tinnitus clinic – but who would have looked after my two very small children for so long? It seemed easier to me that I stayed. ignored the alarm. One of the biggest mistakes, seen in the rearview mirror of my life. Because the tinnitus stayed.

A constant companion

At the time I was hoping it would be quiet again. Unfortunately it isn’t. But still a lot better. Bearable to unheard of. Unfortunately, I can no longer hear tones that are exactly on the same frequency as my phantom tones – cicadas on a summer night in the south, for example. Alright. I wash over stressful moments with the “rocky beach” surf sound of my Zen Tinnitus app. Couldn’t the health insurance just pay me for a house by the sea?

When I ask around, quite a few of my friends and acquaintances have tinnitus. People don’t like to talk about it. Because advice like “You have to really relax!” we really can’t hear anymore. There is also the concern of being seen as less resilient because we need a little more quiet to compensate for the lack of stillness. No, we are not bulletproof. So what? But if someone keeps playing music in our house as a strategy of wear and tear, like they did with dictator Noriega, we’ll be the coolest. We just ignore it.

For me, the tinnitus has meanwhile become an over-ambitious caretaker who drives around with the vacuum cleaner between my ears. In the beginning I felt like I was stuck with him in a one-room apartment while he sucked the full pot around me. Nothing could pull the plug on him. What then worked better: mentally expanding the head further and further, turning the apartment into a huge castle. Over time, I mentally urged him out to continue sucking down the hall, then one floor down, then finally way down the ground floor. It got quieter and quieter. He irregularly takes a few days off. We’ve gotten used to each other now, he’s much more considerate and I’m more relaxed. Most of the time I just have better things to do than listening to what he’s up to. But the silence that I loved so much in all its forms will probably only be found again with eternal rest.

Karina Luebke would also rub snake oil on itself for a hibernation. Do you have any relief tips for her? Write us!

barbara

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