Tinnitus the swan song of sounds lost

My grandad was hard of hearing as was my dad and most of his brothers. In light of this, it's no wonder that I grew up knowing and worrying, that I was at risk of going quiet.

I have always protected my ears from loud and high pitched sounds in an attempt to remove any environmental reason to go deaf.

The fact that deafness is an anti-social condition is very scary.

I imagined a silent world and how awful it must be to not be able to hear noise and music, voice and notes and I ended up using noise isolating and noise canceling headphones.

What I didn't anticipate was tinnitus. Recently I have found myself dealing with a constant case of tinnitus and I wonder if the world of the deaf person might not be as silent as I had imagined, but loud, screeching, screaming, phantom sounds that only you can hear.

One theory is that the brain when it stops receiving on a certain frequency experiences tinnitus much as one who lost a limb would experience phantom limb syndrome.

It might be that one needs to speak up for the hard of hearing, not because they needed higher volume but that they need to have your voice louder than the din in their heads.

This makes the tragedy of deafness sound even worse. No pun intended.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with a specialist and maybe there will be good news. The fact that all the tests that I have had over the past 2 years revealed no sign of early onset hearing loss is some consolation.

Tomorrow's consult will maybe shed some light on the tinnitus and help put my mind at ease.

I am not, so much, a visual person as I am attached to the world at the ears.

It's not that music is so important to me so much as my life has a constant soundtrack. I am constantly whistling, and even when I am not, my earworm is a given. I almost always have a tune playing in my mind's ear.

I say stuff out loud to remember, and prefer audiobooks to regular books.

For me the world is sampled and tasted, by its sounds, and it would be tragic to lose that connection.

M Parak Aug 2018