The Surprising Cause of My Tinnitus

By Michael Benson

For many years I was utterly convinced that the many rock concerts that I attended while misspending my youth damaged my hearing. 

We're talking very loud gigs in large venues (Santana, the Dead, Bowie, and others in the Philly Spectrum) and small (Bob Marley in a midsized theater in Philadelphia). Not to mention innumerable clubs later in Albany, New York, and New York City, or outdoors (Fela Kuti in Bed-Stuy, for one). 

The ringing I heard sent me, late last year, into a Google rabbit hole focusing on tinnitus

The list goes on, in truth I don't remember them all, but on several occasions I was positioned directly beside immense speaker stacks for over an hour at a time, with their volumes, predictably enough, set at 11. One thing I distinctly remember is hearing a ringing in my ears after several of those gigs, sometimes lasting well into the next day or even week. 

In short: foolish behavior. While the music was outstanding, I suppose I could have mustered the brainpower to buy an innocuous pair of earplugs and quietly insert them before subjecting myself to such sonic impacts. Hindsight is 10 to 20 decibels (the figure for typical hearing).

The result of all this is that as I reached middle age, I did indeed start to notice a falling off of frequencies. One thing I could and still do hear is myself asking someone to repeat what they just said, and it was around this time that a dread signal started to rise in the noise, as it were: a ringing deep in my inner ears, seemingly continuous and positioned on the sonic spectrum somewhere between the dull continuity of a dial tone (remember them?) and the shriek of jets taking off when heard through airport glass. This ominous ringing seemed to recede when I was preoccupied with something else, but it returned in force as soon as nothing else was distracting me, and it was always (seemingly) there, not loud enough to interfere with my life really, but distracting and worrisome.

It sent me, late last year, into a Google rabbit hole focusing on tinnitus. And as the tone grew and my hearing further declined, I was increasingly convinced that this perception of a sound when there was none had moved into my head and planned to stay for the duration. Tinnitus. A high pitched ringing typically caused by loud noise exposure, with that exposure causing damage to the tiny sensory hair cells in the cochlea of the inner ear, and affecting something between 15 and 20 percent of adults, particularly older ones. (I will be 60 this year.)

Tinnitus?

I was, in short, utterly convinced of this. Until I remembered that I sometimes experienced a wax buildup in my ears, which I had always managed to remove with lukewarm water in a turkey baster (reader, I can tell no lie), one best used in the tub, with the bulb gently pressed, causing a flood of water to (ideally) dislodge the impacted earwax lining my ear canals. And as it happens, impacted earwax that can cause a decline in hearing, and even a ringing sound in eardrums increasingly shut off from the outside world, is also a particular problem for older people.

Hearing loss from too much noise is a risk from our increasingly noisy world. View the 60-second video on YouTube. Photo credit: Michael Benson; graphics by Ben Radatz

Well, I tried that. And my trusty turkey baster routine simply didn't work, causing me to become ever more convinced that tinnitus was the culprit. Still, I'm a science-oriented person, and science operates through observation and empirical evidence. And so I went to see my doctor, or more specifically a very experienced nurse in the clinic we use. She peered into my ears with an otoscope—that pointy, vaguely hammer-shaped diagnostic tool used to examine ears—and immediately saw that they were in fact almost entirely blocked by wax. 

And in far less time than it took me to write this, she hydrated the ear with warm water, using not a turkey baster but something more like a pump sprayer, then inserted (don't try this at home!) a specially rounded pair of tweezers to remove the wax chunks that hadn't come out under water pressure. Which was most of it. (Sorry for the graphic detail, it goes with the subject, alas.)

Net result: A subjective sonic picture of the world around me suddenly sprang back to life in high fidelity stereo—a real-time perception of the environment all the more vivid and valuable for its recent absence. And ever since then I have been valuing it far more than your typical dual-eared, walking-around Homo sapiens. You know the type: They tend to take their hearing pretty much for granted.

Don’t!

All of which is to say, don't do that! Don't take it for granted. Please (a) be aware of how your hearing can gradually degrade due to wax buildup, and (b) don't take any of this as a diminishment of tinnitus's impact. Tinnitus needs to be avoided at all costs, something that can be achieved with adequate ear protection, and it can be managed carefully if and when it appears. Which it may very well still do with me, for all the reasons outlined at the top of this little missive. But I hope not.

May your sonic landscapes be bright and detailed.

Artist, writer, and filmmaker Michael Benson generously shared his Earth images for use in HHF’s new 60-second video, “Listen Up People,” released on World Hearing Day March 3. For more, see michael-benson.com.

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