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My acoustic trauma story

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My tinnitus started a year ago after a loud night out , it was a full fledged loud sound the first morning , I didn’t sleep at all and went straight to work , and worked next to loud drills all day long ! After I rested it calmed but never stopped ! 5 months later I started worrying about it , and went to the doctor , I have sloping high frequency hearing loss on my right ear ( starts at 2khz goes severe at 4khz (90db+)) while my left is perfect, doctor said acoustic trauma ! Some days the sound is almost relaxing , other days it’s a bit annoying , as months pass the bad days become less frequent!

At morning it’s almost gone , after a stressful day it’s louder , if I get mad it screams !

I always protect my ears now when it’s loud , I drink alcohol rarely and just a bit because hungovers and headaches make it worse ! And try to always sleep good ! I feel lucky only one of my ears got the damage , and also I see it as a health indicator now , it’s like my nervous system reacts to stress with sound !

Hearing aid specialist also told me that with my loss no aids can benefit me!

of course there are solutions. Try to get different advises from professional hearing care providers until you find one you feel comfortable with.

@Iammurloc said:

Hearing aid specialist also told me that with my loss no aids can benefit me!

Right ear is definitely aidable, by high frequency loss may require more closed earpiece (power domes or earmold with small vent), which could prevent acoustic feedback during amplification, but occlusion effect may occur.

You can manage this by carefully pushing power domes with proper size to the bony part of ear canal, which can greatly reduce occlusion effect.

In earmold case, it should be made from silicone impression which reach at least 5mm past second bend of ear canal.

Theoretically, there is a possibility that there will be “dead regions of the cochlea” where amplification will not be beneficial, but this is a risk, not a certainty.

You won’t know unless you check. There are people on the forum with much worse hearing loss who wear hearing aids. Try to get help from another audiologist, preferably that who uses Real Ear Measurement - based fitting.

The longer you live with such hearing loss without hearing aids, the more difficult it will be for you to get used to them when you finally put them on, because your brain will need more time to remember how to use frequencies above 4 kHz.

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