We had just finished celebrating my wife’s birthday. She was driving our older son back to his college campus while I stayed home with our younger one. All of a sudden, I heard a horrible sound. At first, I thought it was a loud cricket in my son’s bedroom, but it wasn’t. I searched all through the house and found nothing. Finally, I thought if I fell asleep it would go away. But it didn’t.
The noise soon became high-pitched and even more severe—like a diamond saw endlessly cutting through cement. An audiologist confirmed that my tinnitus (see our related feature article), which had been quite mild, had gotten worse. After a month or two, I felt like I couldn’t live with it—perhaps I’d be better off dead. A friend of mine with severe tinnitus, a psychiatrist, told me that he had contemplated suicide when his condition came on abruptly. And I read that Star Trek actor William Shatner, who has tinnitus, knew of someone who had killed himself because of the condition.
My doctor kept reassuring me. He told me the condition was not going to kill me, that it was something I could get used to. Thus began my long journey of searching for ways to cope.
One solution I tried—which was being studied at the time—was wearing headphones that played baroque music with intermittent white noise. I wore this device for about three hours a day, for months. It cost me $5,000 out of pocket. It didn’t work.
Then, when I was fitted with hearing aids for age-related hearing loss in the high-frequency range, I could hear my shoes squeaking on the floor when I walked; I could once again hear women’s voices and people’s jokes and did not have to fake it by nodding my head without understanding what they were saying; I could hear other sounds that I hadn’t heard in quite a while. That really helped put the tinnitus in the background.
But I was still distressed by the knowledge that I would never sit in silence again. My audiologist asked me if I wanted alprazolam (Xanax) or something like that to ease my anxiety. I was afraid of becoming addicted, but he reassured me that it shouldn’t be a problem—he knew me, and he knew I could handle it. I trusted him, and after taking the alprazolam, I suddenly felt terrific. My anxiety lessened—and I felt like I could handle the tinnitus. Plus, I knew I only needed to take the drug infrequently, and not for very long.
I was also helped by talking to other people with tinnitus and finding out what their experience was like. They would say things like, “I still have it, but I get on okay.” That was very reassuring.
Today, seventeen years after I first heard that imaginary cricket, my hearing impairment is more of an issue than my tinnitus. The tinnitus is a nothing burger these days. And if there’s a distraction, like a code blue at the hospital, I forget that I even have tinnitus. Even less extreme distractions help, like exercising on the treadmill.
To those who don’t have tinnitus, I would say to avoid loud noises. Having been born in 1946 and coming of age in the 1960s, I used to like to turn up the volume to listen to the Rolling Stones and other rock groups. And I liked to rev up car engines. My tinnitus probably wouldn’t have been as severe if I had kept the volume down.
For those who do have tinnitus, I would say that it’s manageable; it can be accommodated. Find a reassuring doctor who will really work with you. There is life after tinnitus. Look at William Shatner. He’s 91 and recently went into space. If he can learn to cope with it (he’s not actually Captain Kirk, after all!), and if I can learn to cope with it, you can, too. So much of it is figuring out which adaptations will work for you.
