The "LDub and the Mosquitoes" Story

LDub and the mosquitoes

It was an ordinary day.  And I have these noises in my head.  Not too much different than any other day though, since I have had the noises for years.  Actually they started in the early 70s.  Tough to describe what they sound like, but if I had to put it in writing, I would say that it sounds like a high pitched humming or a really high pitched treble music note that someone is playing on an organ and never takes their finger off the key.  Or maybe like a huge swarm of mosquitoes that are right outside my ear and won't go away.  What I have is called tinnitus.  Tinnitus is a Latin word that means ringing.  Hey, I should know since I took two years of Latin in high school.  Actually hated every minute of it, but it prepared me for my physical condition!  Tinnitus is not a disease, but a condition that can result from a wide range of underlying causes: neurological damage (multiple sclerosis), ear infections, oxidative stress, foreign objects in the ear, nasal allergies that prevent (or induce) fluid drain, wax build-up and exposure to loud sounds.  Ah ha!  That last part is exactly what caused my tinnitus.  And, I know it!!  Matter of fact, back in the early 70s the school nurse where I taught school told me, after an examination one day when I had this humming in my ears all day, that if I didn't quit coaching the high school rifle team, I would go deaf.  Wow, was that a wake-up call!  No more coaching for the guy that brought Manheim Township the only State Championship team in the history of the school.  Bad part of all of this is that I still have the ringing and it's never going to go away.  Sure, I got hearing aides, 3 times, and they are supposed to mask the sound, but they don't.  I even wrote a story about it a few years ago about how nice the hearing aides were.  Didn't last.  As I sit here typing I can hear the LOUD ringing in my ears; the left one is the worst.  A few years ago I started to get headaches on the left side of my head, directly behind my ear.  If I touched my ear or pushed right behind my earlobe with my finger, the pain would become intense.  I swear it has something to do with the tinnitus, since just before the pain becomes intense the noise in my ear gets unbearable.  Only way to make the pain go away is to take some pain tablets and go to sleep.  Just the pain tablets alone do nothing.  My doctor has no clue what is the problem.  There is no cure for tinnitus which is a potentially life-disrupting condition that affects about 10 to 20 percent of people, mostly those over age 65, but also many veterans of the wars our country has gone through.  The bombs and gunfire would be the cause for the veterans tinnitus just as the gunfire was for me.  Some people, especially hearing specialists, claim that there are various treatments for tinnitus, but let me tell you, there isn't.  As I mentioned, I tried hearing aides three times with little or no success.  Yes, I could hear upper-pitched noises better with the hearing aides, but the ringing also became amplified.  Another commonly tried remedy is a so-called masking device or a white-noise machine that introduces natural or artificial sound into the ears in an attempt to suppress the piercing ring.  Eventually the noise of the masker becomes as disruptive or more annoying as the tinnitus.  I recently read about a Dutch treatment that relies on psychological techniques, like eduction and deep relaxation, to deal with the chronic noises that I hear.  Following an educational session about tinnitus and lessons in deep relaxation, I would be gradually exposed to an external source of the very ringing that I hear all the time.  After 10 or so sessions, I am allegedly supposed to become habituated to the noise and no longer will find it threatening.  Hey, bring it on!!  Supposedly my negative reaction to the noise is what creates the daily life impairment and not the noise itself. I am told that I get stressed out and fearful of the noise when I hear it all the time.  Wouldn't you?  Maybe I would be interested in giving it a try sometime to see if it would help.  But you know, I tend to always have a song in my head that I sing along with, if only to myself.  I learned to do that on my own and it does help, but at times the music wakes me up at night.  I know, to you this all sounds stupid, but just be glad that you don't have tinnitus.  It can get so intense that it's all I hear.  So the music just has to get louder and louder to overcome it.   Like being at a never-ending Jimmy Buffett concert.  But then, is that bad?  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.