Ears

I started working on Project Change My Brain back in January.  As most of my problems are to do with the way I think with the left, verbal side of my brain – worrying for decade over possible meanings of things people have said – I decided to spend more time on non-verbal relaxation.  I would try to learn yoga.  I would spend more time colouring, and listening to instrumental music.

Finding a yoga class turned out to be harder than I had expected, as there is no longer one in the local Village Hall, and the one I saw advertised in a studio in Shepton Mallet that I pass on my way to work wasn’t currently running.  I did enjoy colouring designs to make greetings cards: a big, bear-like dog for a greetings card for a friend, a tree-stump for a condolence card, a semi-abstract Egyptian-looking design of two facing figures for my wedding anniversary.

Listening to music had seemed straightforwardly relaxing.  I don’t take recreational drugs, but I love the hallucinatory effect of listening to instrumental music, either classical or what is sold as ‘relaxation’ or ‘meditation’ music.  Listening to music on a personal stereo is particularly effective, because it feels as though my whole skull is the theatre in which the music is played.

One of my favourite CDs is Zen and the Art of Relaxation by Anzan.  When I listen, sometimes it leads me into the landscape of a garden of rocks and streams.  Other times, it fills my head with abstract images, until the music overflows from my head and fills my whole body, and then my body itself seems to lose its shape and I become the shape of the stream until the music finishes.  It is wonderful, and never quite the same twice.  I return to the real world not disappointed, but refreshed.  This sort of experience is what the word ‘brainwashing’ ought to mean (and, perhaps, originally did).

However, working in a charity shop that sells second-hand CDs, I had bought several more that I had never got round to playing.  So I decided to start working through them, beginning with a trilogy called Spirit of Relaxation 2 by DJ Delirium.  I tried listening to the first CD in the series, Spring Harvest (nothing to do with the Christian gathering of the same name), and found the music repetitive but mostly pleasant.  It was music that I could mostly enjoy diving into and swimming around in.  However, there was an intermittent high-pitched screech that sounded like a streak of bright fluorescent yellow.

I decided I could put up with this.  After all, the CD was only 40 minutes long, and presumably the unpleasant sounds were in there amongst the pleasant ones for a reason and had something to contribute to the whole, and the CD was likely to leave me feeling more relaxed, just as Anzan’s did.

As it turned out, when I had finished the CD and lay still, trying to enjoy silence, I was aware of a persistent high-pitched whine in my ears.  I didn’t really think that forty minutes of not particularly loud music could have damaged my ears, so I hoped that it was temporary.  Or, I reflected, maybe I had already been suffering from tinnitus and not noticed until this CD made me aware of it.

I have always been hypersensitive to noise.  A few weeks earlier, I had heard a persistent thumping beat which I eventually realised was my own pulse.  This made me wonder how much outrage I had wasted in the past on convincing myself that my neighbours were inconsiderately holding late-night parties that kept me from sleep, when in fact all I was hearing was my own heartbeat.

However, this tinnitus was disturbing my sleep.  Consciously focusing on other sounds instead (like the sound of PDB11’s CPAP machine gently helping him breathe as he settled down to sleep) could sometimes help me to relax – but other times, I would catch onto another sound which I found just as distracting as the tinnitus.  And in the daytime, especially in the evening as I grew tired, the tinnitus could make it harder for me to concentrate.

I felt ashamed of complaining about anything so trivial, when PDB11 not only suffers from tinnitus but sleep apnoea, tunnel vision, and, over the past few years, a succession of leg and foot injuries which have hindered him in getting out for walks.  Hundreds of millions of people have tinnitus, and to most of them it isn’t a big deal.  But for me, being kept awake by the noise of my own ears was a big deal.

What frightened me most was the thought that it was a life sentence.  When I tried researching on the internet whether there was a cure for tinnitus, the consensus seemed to be that there usually wasn’t.  It might be curable if it was the result of an ear infection or earwax, or there might be a possibility of sound therapy to retrain my brain to tune out the sound, but I suspected that the latter was expensive and I was more likely to be offered counselling or cognitive behavioural therapy to help me get used to having tinnitus and learn to live with it. 

I felt that I didn’t want to live with being kept awake by tinnitus several nights a week for the rest of my life.  I was frightened by the thought that this was the first sign of ageing, and that if I lived maybe another four or five decades, my body could only deteriorate more and more over time, giving me problems that made tinnitus look trivial.  Many of my friends have health problems of one sort or another, from Crohn’s disease to back injury to migraines to cancer to prolapsed uterus.  Most of them don’t constantly complain about their health (though I certainly can’t blame the ones who do).

What scares me about ageing is that I am midway through my life and yet haven’t truly found out how to live yet.  I don’t feel ready to die when I haven’t yet lived life to the full – mostly because I have wasted so much of my time from the age of thirteen onwards worrying that my best years were already behind me and that only childhood had any worth or meaning.

It made me wonder whether reading novels with disabled heroes had taught me nothing, if I couldn’t accept imperfections in my own body.  In the works of Lois McMaster Bujold alone, we have Miles Vorkosigan (born with birth defects including brittle bones as a result of prenatal poisoning; by the later books, also suffers from seizures), his brother Mark Vorkosigan (fairly mentally unstable even before he developed Dissociative Identity Disorder), Miles’s childhood bodyguard Sergeant Bothari (has a whole bunch of mental health problems including schizophrenia, anti-social personality disorder, and memory damage), Bothari’s friend Lieutenant Koudelka (has a clunky prosthetic nerve system as his original neural system was destroyed by battle injury) Lupe dy Cazaril (at the point where we first meet him, is virtually crippled from being flogged nearly to death while a galley-slave, and, not surprisingly, is also psychologically traumatised by the experience) and Dag Redwing (missing right hand from a past battle).  Yet much as I love all of them, both as heroes to read about and people I would want to be friends with if they are real, and much as I love and respect my real-life friends who struggle with various problems, it didn’t make it easy for me to accept myself.

I consulted my GP about tinnitus (although I wasn’t sure why I was doing this if there was no cure).  I wondered whether my tinnitus might be a response to hearing loss, as I had noticed for the past few years that my ears felt blocked.  He gave me a quick examination and said my ears seemed fine to him, but advised me to consult an audiologist at an optician’s if I was worried, as waiting for an NHS audiologist took months.

In the meantime, I got on with learning to cope, and dismissing at least some of my worries.  I worried that I had lost the ability ever to relax enough while listening to a personal stereo to be able to enjoy any music – but it turned out that Anzan’s Zen and the Art of Relaxation still worked its magic on me.

I worried that going on the silent meditative retreat that PDB11 and I had planned for the summer would mean being shut in a soundproof room to be tormented by hearing only the noise of my own ears with no ambient sound to mask them.  PDB11, when I rang him from work because I was panicking about this prospect, rang up the retreat centre and confirmed that ‘silent’ didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to open the window and experience ambient noise.  (I had forgotten, when I called to ask him about this, that he has a phobia of making phone calls, and so his willingness to call anyone was a huge sacrifice for me.  I am truly grateful.)

But mainly, I had worried about hopelessness, until I thought to Google not ‘Is there a cure for tinnitus?’ but ‘Does tinnitus ever go away?’  When I asked the question this way, I found endless medical sites reassuring me that it usually does go away on its own after a few days, weeks or months, often without needing medical intervention, and is regarded as chronic only if it lasts more than three months.  The NHS website I had looked at earlier had said that ‘If the cause of your tinnitus is unknown or cannot be treated, your GP or specialist may refer you for a type of talking therapy,’ – but I had completely overlooked the implication that sometimes it can be treated – as well as the fact that the same site had said, at the top of the page, that ‘It… may get better by itself.’

I discovered that, now that hiding away in silence was no longer an option for me, I could enjoy embracing sounds.  In the past, if I was having trouble sleeping, I slept in the spare room so that I wouldn’t disturb PDB11 if I got up in the night, and so that he wouldn’t disturb me if he did.  Now, sleeping in the same bed as him became particularly important in lulling me to sleep.

I discovered that during the daytime, opening the window and letting sounds in could be liberating.  Birdsong, the rushing of the wind and the stream in the woods could be relaxing – but so, compared to tinnitus, could even the sound of traffic on the road outside.  It reminded me of Tom Paxton’s song ‘Oklahoma Lullaby’.

As PDB11 and I were both having sleep problems, we decided to try Nytol, a valerian root tablet which is supposed to help.  I was surprised at how effective it was for me.  Or possibly believing it might help was what worked.  Anyway, except for one episode when I was worrying about something else, I have mostly been sleeping better.

Finally, it was Saturday 1^st March and time for my audiologist’s appointment in Midsomer Norton.  I decided to walk there, as it was a beautiful day for my first decent-length walk this year.  Opinion is divided on when the first day of spring is.  Some people would say 20^th March (the vernal equinox), but my friend Doom Metal Singer considers that this is the middle of spring, and that the start is Imbolc, on 1^st February.

Anyway, for my purposes, 1^st March this year felt like the start of spring.  There were flowers everywhere: not just snowdrops and crocuses, but celandines, daffodils, primroses, pansies, nasturtiums, lungwort, speedwell, and lots of heather everywhere.  I saw a berberis shrub in blossom, which the first bees to wake up were eagerly exploring.  When I saw a bunch of tulips, they turned out to be artificial, but it felt so spring-like that I almost wouldn’t have been surprised if they were real.

The audiologist examined me carefully, showing me what his camera saw as it peered down my ears.  He reassured me that my ears were healthy and clean, with no build-up of earwax, but explained that the blocked sensation might be in my Eustachian tubes, for which I would need to consult an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist.

He shut me in a soundproof room, with large ear-muff-shaped headphones covering my ears, to test my hearing. With no other ambient noise, my tinnitus became noticeable, and this made me realise how unobtrusive it had become over the past month and a half.  Sometimes, when I wake in the morning, I can’t hear it at all, but even when it is present, it isn’t a big problem any more.

The audiologist played sounds into my headphones, gradually decreasing in volume, which I had to signal that I could hear by pressing a button.  Sometimes, I wasn’t sure whether I was actually hearing these or just guessing that they were there because the pattern of sounds indicated that there would be another beep coming around now, but he seemed satisfied that my hearing was fine.

At any rate, I felt fine.  It had been a wonderful day walking to Midsomer Norton and back.  And a month earlier, I hadn’t really believed that I could ever feel this okay again.  Maybe my tinnitus will go away completely in another month or so, but if it doesn’t, it has faded to something bearable, and I don’t have to believe that my life won’t be worth living if it isn’t cured.

I can see fairly obvious parallels between the way I worried about tinnitus, and the way I worry about depression.  It isn’t the same thing; depression doesn’t necessarily go away, and being persistently (or even intermittently) deeply depressed really isn’t compatible with being happy and hopeful, as this would be a contradiction in terms.

But probably a lot of the solution is similar.  I need not to panic over the worst-case scenario I can think of before I have done the research and established how likely the worst-case scenario actually is.  I need to accept that depression, like tinnitus, doesn’t need to disappear completely and instantly for my life to be worth living.  I need to find ways of coping during the difficult times, including distracting myself and (for the most part) avoiding too much loneliness and silence.  I need to eat healthily, get plenty of time outdoors, and do what I can to get a good night’s sleep, so as not to be caught in the cycle of ‘Tinnitus/depression keeps me awake; worrying about tinnitus/depression keeps me awake even more; being sleepless makes me stressed; being stressed makes tinnitus/depression worse.’  (Of course, there is an additional vicious cycle here, as depression can cause tinnitus, and tinnitus provides one more thing to be depressed about.)   And when I have moments when it doesn’t trouble me, thinking, ‘Where’s it gone?’ isn’t a good idea as this will just summon it back.  If I can let it come and go as it pleases, it might get bored and leave.