Eeeeeeeeee….
Imagine this: someone clamps a wooden clothes peg onto the little finger of your left hand. (Or right, if you are left-handed.) It doesn’t really hurt, and doesn’t get in your way but it’s unpleasant and you’d rather it wasn’t there. After a few minutes you are engaged in conversation and you forget (almost) that you have the peg on your finger. But every now and then you are distracted by the pain, your attention is broken, you are annoyed.
You try reading a book, eating a meal, watching a programme on TV. You get some long periods where you almost forget the peg, but it’s hard to ignore.
Then at night, when there’s nothing to draw away your attention, the pain of the peg seems worse than it has been all day.
You wake in the morning, and somehow you don’t notice the peg. At least for a few minutes. Then, a twinge, and suddenly you are back to the constant irritation.
You ask for the peg to be removed. You are told “no”. You ask “why?”. They show you your finger, there is no peg there. It’s in your mind. Your brain has undergone some form of “adjustment” and the sensation of the peg on your finger is a manifestation of this. There’s no cure. It’s there forever. Every day. Every night. For the rest of your life. You can perform some actions now and then that will very briefly make the pain worse, but it will never get better.
Now, instead of it being a painful peg on your finger, suppose what went awry in your brain left you with the sensation of a scream, a high-pitched whistle, on the left side, close to your left ear, but on the inside of your head. 8kHz, to be precise. 50-60dB, about as loud as someone talking. Only they’re blowing a whistle. On the inside-left of your head.
That’s me. I suffer from tinnitus and that’s what it is like for me. All the time. Has been this way for decades, gradually getting louder, or so it seems to me.
I’ve been asked what it’s like. To demonstrate I use a tone generator on my phone, place it on their shoulder and turn it on. Some people can’t hear it because 8kHz is quite high and the older you get the harder it is to hear high frequencies. Unless the sound isn’t really sound, which is why I will always be able to hear it, even if I were to go completely deaf. Those who can hear the tone generator usually ask me to remove it after a few seconds. It’s unpleasant. Like a peg on your little finger. You wouldn’t want that there forever, would you?
Eeeeeeeee……!
Categorised as: LUE