Silence would be golden

On November 9, 2016,  I sneezed violently and my ears began to ring. That was nothing unusual. My ears often rang for a few seconds after a cough or sneeze. But the ringing has continued, nonstop, ever since. 

After undergoing a series of hearing tests, an ENT physician told me I have tinnitus, and nothing can be done about it.  Adding insult to injury, he said that people with chronic tinnitus (about 20 million Americans according to the Tinnitus Foundation) aren’t really hearing anything. The sounds we hear are auditory hallucinations. While we perceive we hear something, there is nothing there. But, because perception is reality, we are indeed hearing something, even though we aren’t. (Got it? Me neither.) 

Ringing isn’t the right word to describe the sounds inside my head.  Ninety percent of the time I hear this. The rest of the time it is this. 

And it's relentless. Every single sound  — every conversation, every TV show, every song on the radio — is filtered through those sounds. The volume varies. Sometimes it’s low. Sometimes it is so LOUD I can barely hear over it. 

It is hard to believe the sounds I am hearing aren’t being heard by people around me. For the first year or so, I would sometimes smoosh my ear against my wife’s ear and ask if she could hear the noises reverberating inside my ear canal. She never could. Which is hardly surprising since they are apparently real only to me.

The sounds are particularly loud late at night. I keep a whirring fan next to my side of the bed in an attempt to drown them out so I can relax but the fan doesn’t always do the trick and some nights I don’t get to sleep at all. Last night was one of those nights.

We had gone to dinner with friends. Across the room a one-man band was performing songs from the sixties and seventies. The songs he had selected were particularly obnoxious   — some of most annoying ever recorded. The amplifiers were cranked up so high I could barely hear a word anyone at the table was saying. I simply nodded my head in agreement whenever someone looked my way and said something, assuming I was participating in the conversation. As I lay awake replaying one of those conversations, it occurred to me that I may have nodded yes, I agree that Hillary Clinton should run again.

This morning the sounds I’ve been hearing for the last four years have been replaced by this God-awful song from last night. It’s as if the one-man band was somehow able to record over the magnetic tape inside my head that, for the last four years, has been playing a continuous loop of radio frequencies and chirping crickets.

If I am to be condemned to hearing music 24/7 for the rest of my life why can't it be something soothing like Pachabel’s Canon in D Major or St. Saens' Carnival of the Animals?  

Hell, “I Got You Babe” or  "You Light Up My Life" or “I’m Henry VIII I Am" or even "Disco Duck" would be preferable to what I'm hearing.

Don't you agree?