An Eternity of Sound

Disclaimer: I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about this condition on my blog, but I felt like it was necessary to write one post more in detail on it. I think people should have a deeper look into who I am personally and how I take on big problems such as this. This is a personal essay I wrote for my storytelling class in college adapted to this blog. Regardless, it is still in a different format from my usual posts. I feel as though it covered a very broad topic that may help people who are dealing with the corona virus pandemic. Hope you enjoy it (and please be nice!).

It is Midnight, time for me to retire for the night. I finish logging in my journal, brush my teeth, and enter my bedroom. It’s quiet in there, the only noise coming from the blowing fan. But I hear more than that. As I make my way to my bed and lay my head on that soft beige pillow, it becomes audible to me: that monotone ringing in my ears.

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It all began last May. My mother had taken me to Dover Days: a celebration of the capital of the first state. It’s a huge event, from the parades, to the exotic foods, to the loud music. Too loud, in fact. We met up with some family friends that we knew. Everyone was congratulating me on my commitment to the University of Delaware. We were laughing, drinking, and dancing to the music. And then I noticed something off about sounds from the band. They had a static sound to them. Almost as if the speakers were at maximum decibels. When they stopped and all went silent, I could still hear a faint ringing in my ears.

I wasn’t terribly worried at the moment. I’ve experienced ringing in my ears after loud events in the past. It wasn’t until the ringing lasted a few days that I knew this was a big problem. I went to see my pediatrician, who referred me to an ENT. Both doctors diagnosed me with tinnitus.

Tinnitus affects everyone differently. It can feel like a radio signal going off in your head or it may be a slight buzz. It may take a few days to go away or it may take years. There is no concrete answer on how to solve tinnitus or if it will ever resolve. Everything about tinnitus is uncertain, a matter of waiting for an end.

Neither of my doctors knew anything about my tinnitus other than the fact I had it. And until I got some sort of resolution, I had to learn to live with it. This was very difficult in the beginning as this was when the ringing was the loudest. I was nervous, afraid of how the future of my hearing would unfold. I didn’t want to lose the sensation of silence, quiet time was an important part of my daily life. My panic over the situation consumed me, taking all of the enjoyment out of my life.

I remember the first few nights with tinnitus. I tried to tune the ringing out in my head and focus on sleeping, but it put a lot of strain on my head. I put the fan on to drown out the ringing. It wasn’t enough, I could still hear it. The stress of tinnitus and it’s uncertainty kept me up at night, creating a lot of headaches for me. These headaches only led to the ringing getting louder, creating a vicious cycle. And I went through that cycle every night for the first few weeks.

By night, the ringing was a terror in my head. By day, it was a minuscule inconvenience to my everyday life. The ringing is only so loud before it gets drowned out by other sounds. Even a whisper is enough to cancel out my tinnitus. Only when I was in a quiet room could I hear remnants of the ringing.

That’s not to say it didn’t create some changes within my life. As the ringing only began near the end of the school year, I had the whole summer to try and help the healing process. I would stay in my room all day, lie in bed, staying away from even the slightest sound that could make it worse. Even the sound of a toaster popping up was considered too loud and would interrupt my mending ears. My view of the world had been distorted, everything suddenly becoming a danger to my ears. I was cautious of anything that could produce noise, like an overprotective mother to myself.

Before the incident, I used to listen to music from my earbuds all the time. I would go out running with music playing at least twice a day. Once my tinnitus started, I couldn’t touch those earbuds for three months. I was nervous that putting speakers next to my ears would interrupt the healing process. I couldn’t run around my neighborhood, listen to David Bowie’s “Starman,” and allow his soothing voice to take me away. When I went outside running, I let the calming sounds of nature fill my ear canals. It was the only time I could get peace.

I wasn’t too keen on telling my friends about it either. I hid my condition from all of my college friends, with the exception of my roommate and one other friend. I wasn’t sure how this would change people’s view of me. I didn’t want others to look at this as a limit on my abilities, a weakness.

The hardest part of my whole healing process was all the uncertainty. Would the ringing get any softer in the future? Is it gonna be this loud forever? Will it just stop altogether in an instant? The only answers I could get were from time. At first, that wasn’t good enough. I needed a resolution.

I made the horrid mistake of turning to the internet to find some answers. I asked my questions on an Internet forum site known as Reddit. The responses were exactly what I was hoping not to hear: it’s permanent, deal with it. I had a brief lapse in judgement where I trusted these nobodies over physicians with 8 years of med school under their belts.

Looking back, it was somewhat foolish of me to listen to these people on what my future was going to hold. Their uneducated responses put me in dark places of fear and discomfort that took me weeks to get out of. I let their pessimism take over my optimism. Their outlooks on my situation petrified me. All I could think about was the tinnitus continuing till the day I die, never resting and haunting me forever.

The future is a scary concept for a lot of people. Especially now in the midst of the corona virus outbreak. We all know what the corona virus is, but we don’t fully understand it. We don’t know for sure if someone is clean of it until they start showing symptoms, which could take up to two weeks. We don't know what surfaces are contaminated with the virus because we don’t know who touched them. We don’t know how long the corona virus will keep us in quarantine because there has never been anything like this before.

There is no concrete answer on how this pandemic will resolve. Everything about the future of corona virus is uncertain, a matter of waiting for an answer. This uncertainty has created a lot of fear in the world population, a fear similar to the one I faced with my tinnitus.

The way that certain events unfold will always be a mystery right up till the moment they happen. We fear the unknown because we want to have control over what will happen. But sometimes, we need to accept that we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know what will happen in the final chapter. It’s hard for people to take a leap of faith like this and hope things will turn out alright. It may not be a guarantee that you’ll land on two feet, but it’s not out of the question.

As for me, I’ve come to better terms with being hopeful for a resolution. While it has been months since it first started, I’ve noticed major changes in the tone getting softer and softer. It has diminished to the point that I only hear it in dead silent rooms. I know it will not haunt me for the rest of my days, it is too silent now to do that. And with recent breakthroughs in possible cures for tinnitus, medicine may clear up the issue for me. I don’t know what will happen, but I am okay with that. I have a newfound sense of hope that everything will turn out right in the resolution. With the corona virus becoming an ever-escalating situation, hope is the most powerful weapon we have. And until that day when we can all come back together, stay Mattastical!