Marcia Aldrich

In My Head: Tinnitus

Origin

From the Latin tinnire, “to ring or tinkle like a bell.”

Definition

The perception of noise or ringing in the ears.

Paradox

Nothing outside of the ear makes the sound. It is a noise from within.

Frequent descriptors

Ringing is just one often-reported sound: others are roaring, hissing, buzzing, and clicking.

Less frequent descriptors

Crickets, screeching, whooshing, pulsing, ocean waves, dial tones.

Music has been reported, a symptom known as musical ear, that is, music on a loop. When I heard of this, I said, Really?—in my outside voice.

Don’t delude yourself—it won’t be Bach’s Prelude and Fugue no. 1 you hear. Imagine Uptown Funk on repeat for the rest of your life. How would you cope with that? Would you dance your way to eternity?

Which would you pick?

None of the above, you say. I understand. But what if you had to pick one, which one would it be? Ask yourself. If you had to be accompanied by a sound for the rest of your life, an inescapable sound, which would be the least challenging? I wouldn’t pick ringing or screeching, I can tell you that.  

Conundrum

At first I looked about to see if I could identify the source of the noise—a light bulb going dead, an insect caught in the wall.

There was nothing making the noise. I was making the noise, if I can even put it that way. Putting it that way suggests agency, as if I voluntarily made this sound. But I did not. The sound makes me.

My own Model T

Two years ago, when I first talked to my doctor, she asked, “Is it ringing?” Because, of course, ringing is the most common descriptor. I shook my head no. “Not ringing,” I said.

“Hissing” or “buzzing” comes closer, although neither quite captures the sound. Buzzing suggests a bee or insect in motion. Hissing calls to mind a teakettle right before it boils, or a venomous snake, or an old-fashioned radiator, like the ones my grandmother had in her apartment. These are close, but not close enough. The radiator rattled more than hissed.

I could call it static. That’s what the sound reminds me of—when the car radio is tuned to no station, tuned to the space between the dials, with no shut-off button. As if my head is a receiver that can’t find the transmitter.

Silence

Silence is an ideal, never achieved, only approximated. If I pay attention, there is always something to hear, my deep inhalation of breath or the beat of my heart. I have known true darkness, but I have never known true silence. There is only something we call silence, and I’ve lost it.

Think about that for a moment, really slow down and think about it.  To lose silence. To be accompanied everywhere by a sound that can’t be shut off because it is inside you. There is no button to punch, no dial to turn, no switch to move to the Off position. The batteries can’t be removed to stop the smoke detector from beeping. (Oh god, what if the noise in my head was that? I’d have to throw myself out a window to make it stop. I’d have to stop me in order to stop it.)

Mystery

The Mayo Clinic suggests it is a common problem, affecting 15–20 percent of the population.

And yet I know no one other than myself who has it. Is it a secret people keep to themselves out of shame, because no one can explain its appearance? And so they worry that they did something that brought it on, though they don’t know what?

A little like dementia. Who knows why some are afflicted and some are not. The afflicted ask, what did I do to deserve this? But why shouldn’t it happen to me and not someone else? Why should I be immune? Perhaps the next woman I see on the street will be listening to her head just like me.

History

I don’t speak of my tinnitus to others, but then I have long been an enemy of conversations about health. My parents were very old when they had me, and I was too young to tolerate updates on their health, their appointments with the doctor, about how they were feeling. About their sleep and teeth and blood pressure. And I vowed not to follow in their footsteps.

Aside

Ironic, isn’t it, that here I am, talking about how I feel?

Causes (1)

It is said to be a symptom, rather than a cause, of an underlying condition. But that underlying condition can rarely be identified. Often the catchall word aging is gestured to. Tinnitus afflicts the aging population, of which I am one, accompanying an age-related hearing loss.

Problem

I have no hearing loss.

Surprise

When I imagined getting old, I thought of many things—wrinkles, sags here and there, breakages, unwanted growths. But I never imagined that I would become a faulty appliance that can’t be repaired, with eternal static on the line.

Compare and contrast

It cannot be started and it cannot be stopped. The volume can’t be turned down. Some hear it constantly. That would be me. Some intermittently. Not me. Some have it in one ear. Not me. And some in both. Me.

It might get loud

I have been asked if it is severe or mild. How can I know? The doctors could use a scale, as they do for self-reported pain: if 10 is the loudest noise you have ever heard (Cream at the Shrine Auditorium in 1968) and 1 is the softest (the wind in native grasses), how loud is it?

The question itself makes me anxious that the decibels could increase, or that the current static will turn into something worse, like screeching or wild bells or god forbid that old chestnut played at sad wedding receptions, Memories. That in my future I could feel l am a crazed church or a plane forever taking off or an after-hours bar for disappointed men who have nowhere to go.

Causes (2)

An exact cause is unavailable, like when you call someone and her assistant says she is unavailable and that’s all she says.

No source of the sound can be identified to explain my tinnitus. The usual broad speculations about ear injury, too many loud sounds, earwax, bone rigidity, circulatory disorders—none of those has been persuasive. What seems more likely is an inflammation of brain tissues, a trauma that no one can identify, one of the unseen consequences of the aging process.

And since the cause cannot be determined, it cannot be treated.

Prevention

You can’t prevent it. Sure, I’d advise you, don’t work without protection on a construction site, and turn the volume down on your headphones. But in most cases tinnitus is the result of something mysterious that can never be named.

Doesn’t that make you feel good?

You can, I’m told, get used to it.

Abide with me

At the outset of its uninvited residency, it freaked me out. I had panic attacks, especially at night. I thought I’d have to yank my head off to get it to stop.

Here is one thing I did. I listened to white noise as I was going to sleep. I started with the sound of falling rain, but it rains so often in the Pacific Northwest that the sound depressed me.  Next I chose crickets. I thought they might remind me of summer nights when I was younger, sleeping with the windows open to the chirping in the backyard. That lasted all of one night. Finally I settled on ocean waves crashing. I prefer this one, the way the waves draw back and then return, with tremulous cadence slow, like a melancholy poem.

Types

I have what is called subjective tinnitus. Only I can hear it. Everyone else must take my word for it. And there is objective tinnitus, which an audiologist can hear during an examination. This is rare. Very rare. So rare I doubt it exists.

Complications

The best I can say is that walking through a forest or desert, I can almost disappear into it. I can almost forget myself.

The static gets louder when I’m alone and inside, without ambient noise like ferry horns or garage doors opening or trash pickups or leaf blowers. Standing in my closet is excruciating.

It gets louder when I focus on something like reading or breathing, activities that require me to become centered, only my center is now a fritz.

It gets loudest at night when I am in bed, the covers pulled up, my head on the pillow, breathing in and out slowly. That is when it is the loudest.

At these times, I am swallowed up into it. There is someone who is me and there’s the sound and me is lost in the sound. I am the sound.

Looking ahead

Sometimes I find myself thinking the static might go away, that someday I’ll wake up and it will be gone. I find myself hoping this is so. I’ve read about tinnitus that disappears. But so far, it hasn’t gone away, not even for an hour. It doesn’t take siestas or visit a friend. I think I am waiting for something that never will happen.

Which bells?

The Latin tinnire gives us, via Edgar Allan Poe, the word tintinnabulation,

… the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

The same poetic impulse makes me sometimes call it tintinnitus.

Poe’s poem, by the way, has different bells for each of four stages of life: tinkling bells, wedding bells, despairing bells, and tolling bells.

Tolling bells

Will my last thoughts be of static, a fly buzz as I’m dying? And will I say, Still here?

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press.