beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

I have tinnitus. I've pretty much always had tinnitus, apparently: there's always been these tones ringing when there's no external sound. I assumed everyone heard them, since people talk about what they hear in an anechoic chamber, and there's always been this folk idea of sound just naturally generated by your neurons working or whatever.

My father has tinnitus, a relic of his military service, so to me it was always something that kept you from hearing the beeping of a watch alarm. Nothing dramatic has ever happened to my hearing: no habits of over-loud concerts or headphones, no heedless use of firearms. When I was in grade school, on July 4th down at the beach, I was standing maybe 20 or 30 feet from a detonating M-80 firecracker; while it's given me a lifelong healthy respect for the power of explosions, I don't recall my hearing changing. I had constant awful earaches as a kid, so maybe that's related to the tones? There's also a bunch of somatic stuff that comes with my package of brain wiring, and I'm just learning it still, so this could be in there.

Then, a couple years back, a new, lower tone appeared. Well, says me, that's never happened before. I should go get my hearing checked! The doctor said my ears looked fine, and passed me on to the audio technician for a detailed test.

Now, tinnitus is kind of a shitty phenomenon, because unless you've got one of a sparse handful of uncommon medical conditions, the treatment is basically to deploy coping strategies so it doesn't bother you so much. It would sometimes be maddening as a kid, because I couldn't get away from it. Telling this story to my therapist the other day, I realized that's probably where I developed the habit of falling asleep to music or a tape of old radio shows (Abbott & Costello and Burns & Allen were favorites). It gives my attention something to focus on outside my head, which is pretty much the standard of treatment anyway. Meditation let me further adjust my cognitive response, so when a new tone pops up–there's a type that comes and then fades eventually–I can sort of...embrace and absorb it, I guess. Really, I have no idea what's going on.

Except for the mental experience of it, I don't think the tones have affected my daily life. They don't obviously mask sounds in the environment, or hinder my musicianship, even on instruments like voice and violin, where you can only tune by ear. It mostly comes up when I'm trying to pinpoint a faint sound, and I have to decide if I'm actually hearing the faint sound, or if it's just the tones, or some other auditory hallucination.

You know what plays a bunch of faint sounds for you and tells you to signal if you hear one? Yep. A hearing test.

I was driving the poor woman nuts, I think. I'd be trying to distinguish if there was a sound in the headphones, and she'd say things like "Just press the button if you hear a tone," and my explanation didn't make any sense to her. When it was finally done, she showed me the graph showing the ordinary hearing loss for someone my age. Somewhere in there, she said I had tinnitus.

I looked at her blankly, and said, "Really? I thought I just had those tones."

She stared at me like I was an idiot (which happens less often than one might reasonably expect), and said, slowly, "If you hear a sound. Which is not coming from the environment. That. Is tinnitus."

And people wonder why I never go to the doctor.