Ring, ring! Tinnitus calling

In the summer of 1972, as I was working in downtown San Diego, I suddenly sneezed sharply. After the sneeze, I had a weird physical sensation, like a bucket of water had been dropped over my head but the water stayed in the bucket, around my head.

That feeling went away after a couple of minutes, thank God. I did not have to spend the next 40 years adjusting to life with a full bucket of water over my head. But when the bucket went away, it left something behind. There was a ringing in my left ear. As I sit here writing this, the ringing sounds the same as it did in the summer of 1972. Same volume, same tone, a high pitch like you could hear on the radio when you turned the dial a certain way, when radios had dials.

I don't know if I am hearing this sound, or transmitting it. Neither does medical science, which calls the sound "tinnitus," from the Latin tinnere, to ring. Webster's online defines it as "a sensation of noise (as a ringing or roaring) that is caused by a bodily condition (as a disturbance of the auditory nerve or wax in the ear) and typically is of the subjective form which can only be heard by the one affected." I am awfully happy, in terms of having found women who would marry me, that I am afflicted by the subjective form, and not the objective, which other people, horror of horrors, can hear. Can you imagine that, and snoring, too?

The Mayo Clinic offers more information than I ever thought or hoped I would find on the subject and none of it relates to my circumstance, which is sneeze-induced tinnitus. I had a ruptured eardrum, and was present at the birth of rock and roll, and was in the artillery, and had my share of ear wax, but this was all before 1972. My own suspicion is that the sneeze jiggled my stirrup off the anvil (you remember, the ear bones we learned, for some reason, in school) just enough to cause a high-pitched rattle, like a loose muffler on a car going near the speed of light. Are you listening, Einstein?

Does it bother me? I don't know. It has been almost 36 years since the sneeze, and I have forgotten what silence, auditory solitude, the breathing of angels, must sound like. I sleep fine, I use the left ear to listen to people on the telephone, I can hear a hotdog hit the grill from half a mile, so I guess I have gotten used to living with it. It comes up because I wrote a column about it years ago, and a reader, Pam, a fellow sufferer, remembered it and sent me an email wondering what I knew now. I am flattered she asked me, instead of the Mayo Clinic, but I can't give her much more information than they can.

She said hers had gotten worse, and she asked about my concentration for writing or reading. I have no problems there. My problem with reading concentration is the racket my imagination makes as I try to focus on sentences. Pam said she now has new "sounds" in her ears, two or more variations on the original high-pitched sound. She said she had trouble hearing conversations, on TV and in person. Pam, please understand the spirit in which I say this, but regarding TV, you aren't missing much.

"I was hoping to be selected for a tinnitus research project, but was denied for the current study," she said. "I did not meet their requirements since my 'ringing' changes in volume."

So tinnitus elitism rears its ugly head. Pam said she had joined a tinnitus support group. Anyone out there with real experience, for her and the group?