Tuesday, 26 February, 2019
Mired in the blahs a bit. The wedding was a nice little oasis of colour and new stuff to do but, for the most part, February has been spent right here at home or around the neighbourhood. And it’s not as if there’s nothing going on here. It’s all in my head!
My head being a bit full of tinnitus.
If you think tinnitus is just an annoying, somewhere-in-there, ringing in your ear, you’d be only partly right. Mine is ‘recurring.’ I can go weeks, months, even years without it – or at least there’s ‘acceptable’ level noise in my ears all the time but then every now and again it gets serious. It spikes and I can’t cope. This isn’t ‘carry on regardless’ any more. It leaves me incapable of doing even the ordinary things. I’m hypersensitive to everyday noises and instinctively avoid them. Running taps, the shower, the sound of footsteps, the wind blowing leaves, traffic driving by, someone unwrapping or rustling paper… This is called hyperacusis.
My personal kind of spike is this – Sometimes there are baby crickets making some noise occasionally, sometimes there are bigger crickets being a bit more insistent, and sometimes there’s a whole meadow full of really huge crickets in full voice for hours on end, if you’re lucky with intermittent breaks. Has anyone ever made a really loud noise too close to your ear? Yelled? Blown a whistle? If so, did you pull away immediately to avoid the noise? Imagine if you couldn’t.
One more thing about tinnitus – it isn’t actually in your ear, although it can certainly drown out other noises or upset your balance (quite a bit in my case) but it’s coming from your brain. Your brain is filling in gaps of sound or frequency with something recognisable. Sort of like phantom limb syndrome….
So back to Hackney and getting out when balance is on my side. It’s unseasonably warm. It’s T-shirt weather for some. My phone weather tells me it’s 19C. And it’s still February.
