Two cans and a piece of string
Sunday February 07th 2021, 9:51 pm
Filed under: Life

A new thing learned: according to the American Academy of Family Physicians, apparently some–not all–types of tinnitus can be heard by a physician putting their stethoscope against the patient’s head. (I’m assuming that’s assuming the doctor has decent hearing.)

Huh.

I’ve had ringing in the ears apparently since I was a toddler who overdosed on the baby aspirin I got into while Mom wasn’t looking. I studied audiology in college and learned a lot I wanted to know but walked away from it after being told I could never find a job in the field because my hearing wasn’t great. It would be years before an astute ENT doctor linked that overdose and the progressive loss since to an allergy to NSAIDs I didn’t know I had.

That’s okay, the English major thing turned out better anyway.

But they can actually, objectively listen to my inner-ear hair cells screaming that they’re not responding to sound anymore but only doing what they want to do like a kid in a temper tantrum?

I had never been told that one in my life.

Huh.


4 Comments so far
Leave a comment

I’ve had ringing in my ears since I was 8, which is when I had the measles and the highest fever of my life. Also started having ear infections that year, and I presume the measles came first. I kept having ear infections until high school, then they returned through my twenties. A little nerve damage, a little scarring on my eustacian tubes…glad measles is preventable now. Isn’t it weird the things that can occur to our bodies?

Comment by Marian 02.07.21 @ 10:50 pm

Most of the time I can ignore it. But sometimes (like right now) my tinnitus drowns out the sounds around me. My husband and I recently tried to share with each other what our tinnitus sounds like. Silly exercise. He had found something on the internet with various tones that might match what we hear. Interestingly, we did discover that ours is very different!

Comment by Jayleen Hatmaker 02.08.21 @ 7:36 am

That’s wild!

Comment by ccr in MA 02.08.21 @ 10:55 am

I don’t suffer from tinnitus, but as a child I used to get lots of ear infections. Then I saw an orthodontist. It turned out my bite was crooked, I chomped on my eustacian tube with every bite. He put me in a retainer that slowly straightened things out, and the earaches went away.

Comment by LauraN 02.08.21 @ 6:20 pm



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)