It’s days like today I am very thankful for doing my graphs! I woke up with a headache and bad ringing in my ears, and very deaf. I was woken up early by loud ringing my ears and couldn’t get back to sleep. Then I was irritated by the sound of everyone being joyful on Christmas so I had to go outside. How do I be around family on a day when they are so happy they will all be talking?
As I was saying, the graph is helpful because even though it FEELS worse today, the graph tells my my hearing has actually improved since yesterday. So staying at home and doing nothing yesterday helped. This is psychologically important for me to see and notice the small improvements, because I’m not a great one to look at the big picture, whether that’s eternity, or 10 years, or next year. Instead I easily get stuck in the moment!
So there’s 3 things that I remind myself.
In the now – there is some improvement – but even if there wasn’t that’s OK – God still has things in his control.
In the medium term – I know there is an upward trend in my hearing, and it’s possible that in 6 month I will be better.
In the long term – this life is short and there is an eternity waiting with a new creation where hearing loss or any other problems will no longer be there. So all this is temporary!
Something I want to document about my hearing. The hearing tests that the specialists do don’t capture everything that’s going on. I wonder if they realise this, or they are unaware. But the test measure how loud I can hear at each frequency, but they don’t indicate what the quality of the hearing is. For the past 3 days any noise I hear between about 200 and 600 Hz all sounds the same. If I press notes on a keyboard app that is generating a sine wave every note sound she same. If I measure my level at 250Hz, or 500 Hz, it registers at hearing, But what the hearing tests don’t show is that my ear/brain ins not differentiating between 250Hz and 500Hz. It could be that the doctor’s don’t care about that, because the levels at each frequency give an indication of the health of the hearing, and it doesn’t matter that 250 and 500 sound the same. Or it could be they are unaware.
Anyway I did 2 plots yesterday, one is of the sound volume level I am hearing, and one is of the sound quality.
The top graph has the usual shape of my hearing tests, worse at the left, better high, but the bottom graph is slightly different. The worst quality of hearing is from 200 to 800Hz. Even though my hearing below 200 low volume, what I do hear is clear, so if I turn the bass up it sounds good.
Btu for the frequencies around 400Hz, then I turn them up they sound all wrong. Out of tune. Like a Dalek. Underwater. The hearing tests do not measure this. But I can hear it in my head.
I can also measure it by doing a frequency sweep from say 100Hz to 1000Hz. This is where you play a single note and slowly increase the frequency of it. I can hear a single tone increasing in frequency up until about 200Hz, then the tone disappears and I hear one massive tone, my guess is it’s around 400Hz but it’s hard to tell, then when the rising note hits around 700Hs I can hear it slowly rising again and by 800Hz it’s clear again. At 300Hz-600Hz the background noise is so bad I lose the single sign wave altogether.
The third way I can hear this is if I play a scale on a piano app that is playing a sine wave. The notes from C4 (262Hz) up to C5 (523Hz) are almost indistinguishable – they all sound like the same note. To help improve this I am playing myself songs in this scale, and trying to imagine what they should sound like.
I am playing ‘I am not done changing’ which covers C,D,E,F
I am playing ‘Amazing Grace’ which is so familiar to me from a young age so I can ‘hear’ (imagine) the notes even when my ear is not hearing them and try to force/train my ear to heat them properly. Amazing Grace also has a good message so that encourages me!
Twinkle Twinkle little star has a simple melody and is also well known from a young age so it’s a strong memory.
Joy to the World just goes form C down to C, hitting every not so it’s very useful!
I also did this hearing level above manually, without an app, using a sine wave generator, so that I could track more frequencies. (32,40,51,64 etc instead of just 125Hz,250Hz etc). That’s because the tests have big gaps and I can tell that my hearing is up and down between the frequencies being measured. For example here it drops around 600Hz then up at around 800Hz then down at 1000Hz, by what I estimate to be 20 or 30dB. It takes too long to measure like this each day but I wanted to see what was happening!
Today I was able to isolate the ringing to exactly 320 Hz and an octave up at 640 Hz. By playing it back into my ear while I was writing this article it seems to have mostly gone!
Happy Christmas everyone. I am thankful that my ear has mostly stopped ringing. I think I am ready to face the day.
CIST and SSHL 