Hearing damage can cause ongoing pain as well as tinnitus and hearing loss. This is what happened to me, and what I want you to do about it before it happens to you.
On September 17, 2021, I went into a music studio to play drums on a session.
It was supposed to be a low volume rehearsal.
About twenty seconds into a song, the guitarist and singer cranked the volume on his guitar and started screaming into the microphone. About two seconds after that, I felt a sharp pain in my left ear, like I had been stabbed with something. I dropped my left drumstick and jammed my finger in my ear. A second or two later I got the same pain in my right ear, dropped the other stick, and started yelling at him to stop.
I have not heard silence again, since before that moment.
What I Had Before That Night
I was a sound man for 28 years.
I started at 16, playing guitar and recording, and I spent nearly three decades building an ear. Editing, sound design, producing, mixing, mastering. That ear was my livelihood and it was the thing I was proudest of.
My last gig was December 2018. I walked out of it with no problems at all. No ringing, no pain, nothing.
I want that on the record, because people keep assuming this was a lifetime of loud rooms catching up with me. It was not. I was careful for 28 years. It was one night.
What Happened
I was on drums, about three and a half feet from a 100 watt half stack. The same kind of rig used at rock shows.
I was the one controlling the amp settings, and I had it set low.
Between takes the guitarist kept saying he could not hear his vocals, then that he could not hear the guitar. He kept asking me to angle the cabinet toward me and bring the volume up. I kept angling it and barely moving the volume, because turning it up and turning it away from him made no sense.
We took a break. When I came back he was worked up, messing with his gear.
I sat down behind the drums and turned around behind me to put something down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him swipe the last three knobs on the amp clockwise to 10. Master volume and presence. Presence is the highest frequency content of a guitar, and it is exactly where my hearing loss sits now.
I asked him: "Do you need help with the amp?"
He said: "No, I'm fine."
I said: "You just swiped up those knobs. Do you need help with the amp?"
He said: "No, just play the song."
I counted it off.
Twenty to thirty seconds in, the guitar went loud, distorted and unrecognizable. Then the pain hit my left ear. I had my eyes closed, the way I do on drums to listen better. When I opened them he was strumming with his face red and screaming into the microphone hard enough that the PA was distorting.
I am trained to keep playing through problems. Every working musician is. I kept going with one hand for another second or two, and then the same pain hit my right ear.
It was maybe five seconds of it.
Twenty eight years of building an ear, and about five seconds took it all away.
That Night
I felt sick immediately. At the time I described it as feeling really drunk, without having had anything. I did not have the word for it back then. It was vertigo.
By the time I got home the nausea and the pain kept getting worse. According to what I wrote down at the time, I threw up. I do not remember that part now.
I could not stay on my feet.
I had to ask my family to move to the other side of the house, because every sound hurt.
Lying down made all of it worse. The vertigo got worse, and the ear pain would spike to extremely severe, so I would have to get back up. I ended up sitting against a wall on pillows.
When the pain spiked I tried to call out for help, and the sound of my own voice hurt so much that it stopped me. Like a dog with a shock collar. My phone was two rooms away and my family could not hear me.
I passed out from one of the spikes.
I woke up the next morning with both ears ringing, pain in the left one, and still dizzy.
My vision was off too, but only slightly at that point. After a night of feeling drunk without having had anything, slightly weird vision was more confusing than alarming. Everything else was louder, so to speak. I assumed it was temporary.
I had no idea I was going to have it for the rest of my life.
I figured the worst had already happened and that it would heal.
What It Is Actually Called
For a long time I did not have words for most of this. Every doctor I saw handled their own piece of it. The ENT looked at ears. The ophthalmologists looked at eyes. Nobody put the whole thing together in one place, so for years I could describe my symptoms but not name them.
Here is what I have since learned. If you are reading this because something like it happened to you, these are the terms to bring to your doctor.
Acoustic trauma is the physical damage from the sheer volume. Loud sound destroys the tiny hair cells in the cochlea that convert sound into signals your brain can read. Those cells do not grow back. That is the permanent hearing loss and a large part of the tinnitus.
Acoustic shock disorder is different, and it is the part that hearing tests miss. It is what happens after a sudden, unexpected, threatening loud sound close to the ear. The documented pattern is stabbing ear pain, tinnitus, sound sensitivity, dizziness, nausea and headache. Ear pain shows up in roughly 81 percent of cases and dizziness in roughly 48 percent.
Before I ever read any of that, I described what I felt as being stabbed in the ear with something. That turns out to be almost word for word how the clinical literature describes it. Patients say stabbed, or electrocuted. I got the description right years before I found the term.
Hyperacusis is when ordinary sound causes pain. Not loud sound. Ordinary sound.
Tonic tensor tympani syndrome, or TTTS, is the one that finally explained the strangest symptoms. There is a small muscle in your ear, the tensor tympani, that tightens to protect you from loud sound. After an acoustic incident it can get stuck hyper reactive, firing at levels that should never set it off. That accounts for the spasms in my ear drum, the crackling when I chew or yawn, the fullness, the hearing that goes muffled and distorted and drops out, and the pain from normal sound. The nerve that runs that muscle also serves sensation in the face, which is why the pain does not stay politely inside the ear.
TTTS is still being researched and there is no settled diagnostic checklist for it yet. Some of the writing on it frames it as stress related, and that framing gets used to wave people off. Stress can make the reflex worse. That does not make the pain imaginary. It is a muscle spasming and a nerve being irritated.
An ENT can assess for TTTS. If any of the above sounds like you, ask for it by name.
What Ordinary Sound Does To Me Now
Nine months after the incident I went to the movies with my family. I had pain in my left ear for over a month.
A few months after that I was in a mall parking garage and a car honked its horn. Normal horn, normal volume. I had pain for almost three weeks.
That is why I wear an earplug in my left ear any time I am not alone. Not for concerts. For life.
My Vision
My vision changed after that night too. Double vision, vertigo, brain fog.
I have since seen a neurologist and two ophthalmologists. I have two sets of prescription glasses and I still see double with them on. They just make it less. I get eye fatigue, eye pain and headaches from wearing them.
I am not going to sit here and claim I know the mechanism. There are theories and I have read most of them.
What I know is what I could do before September 17, 2021 and what I can do after.
I Used To Be The Proofreader
I was the one who caught the small mistakes in other people's writing and fixed them. People sent me things to check.
Now I type letters out of order. Not misreading them. My hands put them in the wrong order as I type, and I do not catch it in the moment.
I went looking for what that was and found the word dysgraphia.
I have to proofread myself constantly now, and I use AI to check my own writing.
I used to be people's ears. People's eyes. People's proofreader. I was the one who helped. Now I am the one who needs the help.
That has been as hard as the pain.
What It Cost
I cannot mix for clients anymore.
I work on a computer screen with reading glasses, and only for a few minutes before the eye pain and the headache start. Then I need a few days off. Phones are hard, and I can manage a short time. Anything small that a normal person just looks at and reads, I need a magnifying glass for. Things I could see easily before, I now need a lens to see at all.
I had to quit photography and video work for clients too.
I get maybe a few days a month where the ringing is low enough and there are no spasms or dropouts to work on music. Sometimes only a few hours.
My ENT told me the damage is permanent.
Managing Tinnitus, Things That May Help
None of these repair the damage. What they do is lower how much the damage runs your life, and that is not nothing.
- Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT). Combines sound therapy and counseling to retrain your brain to react less to the tinnitus, so it stops sitting in the front of your attention all day.
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Works on the thought patterns that make tinnitus distress worse. It has the strongest evidence behind it of anything on this list for improving quality of life.
- Sound therapy. White noise or other sound to mask the ringing and make it less noticeable. Worth saying that if you also have hyperacusis, masking has to be introduced carefully and quietly, because the wrong level makes things worse.
- Relaxation techniques. Meditation, deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation. Stress raises the volume on all of it, including the ear muscle reflex.
Protect Your Ears
Disclosure: I use Eargasm earplugs and the link below is an affiliate link with my discount code.
I wear an earplug in my left ear every day whenever I am not alone, to stop light to severe pain in my ear from even normal levels of sound.
Eargasm earplugs reduce volume without wrecking clarity, so you can be at live music, work in a loud room, or walk through a city without your ears paying for it. You can get a pair at eargasm.com/discount/AECYST and save 10 percent with code AECYST.
My ENT also told me that if I want to be around live music at all now, I need professionally fitted custom plugs, around a thousand dollars, and that I cannot use cheap ones for that or I risk further damage and total hearing loss.
Get the protection before you need the expensive version.
What I Mean When I Say It Is Too Late For Me
I used to end this piece by saying it was too late for me. I think that came off wrong, so let me say what I actually mean.
I was not wearing earplugs that night. It was supposed to be a low volume rehearsal. Because I was not protected, I am now stuck with the tinnitus, the TTTS, the double vision and the chronic eye pain.
Maybe if I had not gone to that rehearsal at all, I would be fine today. And if I had earplugs in, I do not believe I would be dealing with any of this.
That part cannot be undone. That is what I mean.
But there are two different people reading this.
If you have not been damaged yet, you still have every chance to keep your hearing. Protect it now. Not when it starts ringing. Now. That is the whole reason I wrote this.
And if something already happened to you, it is not over.
There are real scientists working on this. Tinnitus Quest is a nonprofit funding research aimed at actually silencing tinnitus, backed by William Shatner, who has had tinnitus since standing too close to an explosion on a Star Trek set, along with working producers and engineers who live with it. That work is happening whether or not any of us are watching.
I am doing my own smaller version of that. I am not a scientist. I am an injured audio guy with 28 years of ears behind me, studying this, experimenting on myself, and building something that has been helping me. When it is ready I want to put it out so it can help other people too.
I will never heal physically from this. But I am still creating, and I have found new ways to work and keep going.
That part is not gone.
Sincerely,
Joe (Aecyst)
If you are dealing with something like this, the terms worth bringing to an ENT are acoustic shock disorder, hyperacusis, and tonic tensor tympani syndrome. You are allowed to ask to be assessed for them by name.
