Shakey Mo's thread of misery

wimoweh wimoweh wimoweh
oooooooooh ooohhhweee oohhh umumaweh
- bob marley

Shakey I messaged you, my friend took Klonopin.

we're sending our love down the well for you Shakey <3

lol VG

yeah thx goon I got yr message. I have a psych appt next wednesday we'll see what they say. hopefully something as extreme as klonopin won't be necessary. I am weirded out enough having to take atavan - I am not a big fan of the pharma industry.

well, I can triple-sign that last part from the woeful non-delivery I'm experiencing.

good wishes to Shakes and underaero

sorry morbz

jesus seems like a ton of health crises lately

not sure what aero's goin thru but he's been super-helpful to me so hope I can return the favor

jesus seems like a ton of health crises lately

yeah i didn't want to clutter up the thread with my own misery, but i've had this sciatica/piriformis thing for the last couple months that has me walking with a cane (s/o to morbs), and not for long distances. i've been playing gigs but only if someone else loads my gear in & out. rehab is very slooooow, but at least i can sleep/drive/work.

Is that sciatica in your leg or your back? That stuff scares me, glad you're doing OK.

Yeah, when friend said "Klonopin" I was like, "oh I didn't really want to hear that heavy shit".

it started with a back injury over the summer and there is probably still some disc weirdness involved, but at this point i feel entirely in my hip/butt/leg. it sucks and i have to make an effort not to be an asshole to people while i'm standing or walking. luckily, my gf is a massage therapist and almost a PT, so that helps a lot (although it means that she has to come home to more work sometimes). anyway.

just wish I could hit on some sort of mental exercise to help me ignore this... ugh. second night's sleep of atavan+crickets not as good as first. woke up at 1:30 and had trouble getting back to sleep but then when I looked at the clock again it was 5:30 so I uh guess I slept? I don't even know any more

pretend it's applause? :/

I've lived with tinnitus since I was a small child. It is interesting reading this thread, because for me, sadly, its a fact of life and one I realise Ive kind of got used to at least enough to sleep and not stress too much. But if I pay attention, I notice the continous sound of swooshing and a sort of ringing like the fading aftershock of many bells. I have something like 50% hearing loss in my right ear which has made things worse - it is due to a hole in my eardrum. ENT specialist says I can get it surgically repaired but it doesnt even guarantee it'll fixz the hearing loss and could make the tinnitus worse. fuckin.

So yes much sympathy from this deaf old bat.

I imagine the stress would be hundredfold worse as yours came on suddenly. You arent used to it.

have you tried an electric fan, white noise machine, etc yet - having some other noise your ear can focus on can be a blessing. I know a lot of musicians who sleep with the TV on - not ideal, I know, but as a temporary remedy it can be a thing.

Theres also an excellent white noise app on the iphone that does all sorts of diff noises like ocean, crickets, fans, rain etc. Unfortunately I dont recall the name of the one i had and it seems to have been uninstalled but it was very good.

Jesus, this sucks. Sorry, man.

I bought an alarm clock thing that has a bunch of noise settings - none of them mask it completely but the "summer night" one with the chirping crickets comes the closest. the only thing that really masks it completely is when I'm in the shower, that wide-spectrum sound of running water. (many times I have wished I could live my life in a shower, but alas) ... but functioning day-to-day is just really hard because I feel like it's constantly distracting, and it's so high-pitched that it cuts through pretty much everything. I know basically I have to wait for my brain to re-adjust to ignore it, but right now I'm in this state of trying to *consciously* ignore it, which is very hard, because it's like I can both never just let my mind go nor concentrate.

I was at the comic book store today (Veronica wanted to spend her first $5) and I couldn't bring myself to even care about looking for something for myself because why bother, I wouldn't be able to enjoy reading it

I can both never neither just let my mind go nor concentrate.

fixed

Shakey, I don't know if this will help, but it's an idea. Removing your specific tinnitus frequencies from music you can fall asleep to: http://www.dianehallinen.com/servicesoffered/tinnitus-therapy--notched-music

good luck to you, aero, Trayce - I had a couple weeks of it a few years ago (post-explosion at a jobsite) and hope never to again.

As a bass player who stood next to a drum kit for over 10 years i can totally understand your misery.
As soon as i noticed my ears were ringing i started to use plugs, but it was too late then. Haven't played in a band for years now, but still compose stuff on the computer using headphones.
Slight difference in volume and pitch, right ear (i stood on left of drums) is louder than the left. Noticed just how bad it was when i went camping and there was no other sound around. Was so bad i had to listen to music on headphones to distract me from just how bad it was.

I believe there's a few treatments to ease it, but no actual cure, acupuncture is rumoured to help?

praying for u shakey, feel better

http://www.vocations-holyfamily.com/pics/Healing.jpg

man, i don't know why you're fucking around with crickets on an alarm clock at a time like this, sounds like you need a serious white noise machine? my ex-gf used to have one similar to this, i got pretty used to it: http://www.amazon.com/Conditioner-Marpac-formerly-Sleepmate-980A/dp/B000KUHFGM

good wishes to anyone with ongoing health stuff. it's one of the most frustrating and unfair things there is, and incredibly isolating too, to feel physical problems that nobody else is feeling but yourself, and have to deal with them and have your thoughts filtered through the body that is experiencing those feelings.

the music therapy idea is interesting...sounds fun, at least.

Related to Jaq's link above, AudioNotch might be worth looking at. Some good information on that site about notched audio therapy.

does weed make this shit better or worse (sorry for this post)

- bob marley

OOh that looks interesting. I might have to try it (depending on the cost I guess)

does weed make this shit better or worse (sorry for this post)

depends on the weed & your state of mind

if it's early on in the situation I would not recommend it

I've had fairly severe tinnitus in both years for the past 14 years or so. It gets a little worse every year. It's incredibly high-pitched and never goes away. There's nothing in the world loud enough that I still can't hear the tinnitus above it. And unlike most people I find that white noise and the like doesn't really help, I prefer silence. Because when I'm listening to white noise the ringing just mingles with it and makes me feel like I'm listening to a malfunctioning television instead of soothing white noise. And sometimes playing the piano can make my tinnitus temporarily louder for a couple of days, which has interfered greatly with my playing. But I just try to ignore it and for the most part I'm used to it. I'm not sure I could cope if it got much louder, though.

Yeah mine's never been particularly loud, it goes through stages of being very ringy to the point it almost... feels painful? I'm sure its psychosomatic but it does. Like whem you've drunk too much and yr head is going SHPPSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The other night, howeer, I was woken up by a sudden, much much louder than usual, single-frequency high pitched squeal in my ears that wouldnt fuckin go away, it was enough to wake me. Thankfully that stopped after a while but ugh.

Do people mostly have single-note tinnitus? Mines more like a real chorus of tones, I've always wanted to try and reproduce it with a synth.

My tinnitus invades my dreams a lot, playing the role of fire alarms and alien spaceships zipping across the sky.

And mine is a chorus of high-pitched sounds with occasional low-pitched strains. I also get this thing every once in a while where I feel like I've gone completely deaf in one ear for a second and then there's a hum and I regain my hearing.

Me too, and I think some others have said similar in one of the other tinnitus threads so that must be fairly common, I wonder why it happens.

Anyway my greatest sympathy to all my fellow head-ringers :(

does weed make this shit better or worse (sorry for this post)

depends on the weed & your state of mind

if it's early on in the situation I would not recommend it

I wouldn't say weed made it worse per se but as a chronic pothead tinnitus made being high nigh unbearable. like it just made me fixate on the tinnitus, it was awful. so yeah I wouldn't recommend it. it's been a couple weeks since I had some. dunno when I will try it again.

I find booze can do that too. And, for me, being extra-stressed?

(which as you can imagine is the worst feedback loop ugh)

doubling my dosage of atavan (to 1 mcg) has enabled me to get a couple full night's sleep in the last two days, which has improved my outlook immensely. feel like I am hopefully past the turning point, and the tinnitus seems slightly less irritating/overwhelming than before. back at work today, will see if I can remain functional...

and again, thx for all the support and shared experiences guys

yay! good to hear, shakey

yeah I don't wanna jinx it really. baby steps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncFCdCjBqcE

well, getting back on a semi-regular sleeping routine. tinnitus continues largely unabated, altho there are times where it's ignorable. I am spending an *awful* lot of time wearing my ipod headphones and listening to music (at a reasonable volume! I swear!) just to distract me from it. but I know that can't really be good for me in the long run... the times I'm least conscious of it are being in the shower and being in crowds/outside where there's a lot of background noise. it was good to be with my daughter at the Academy of Sciences over the weekend, and at the Dia De Los Muertos parade, for ex.

signed up for a "tinnitus consultation" with Kaiser this friday, dunno what that will consist of exactly

Had it for fourteen years or so, and can say it has its ups and downs -- most of the time, I sorta forget it's there, but then there'll be periods of a week or three where I'll obsess about the damn thing and really just want to off myself. Those have been pretty rare, mind. When I first got it, I basically just walked around constantly listening for it. Never really looked into any sort of treatments though (tbh, I didn't even tell anyone I had it until very recently; my misery always preferred solitude)
Getting enough sleep and food has been important to me though. I find that when I'm tired, it becomes a lot more frustrating.

Now when I have those lousy weeks, I just try to remind myself that it -will- pass. It's not great consolation, but it's some ...

This is an amazing time though, so I keep hoping that some goddamn genius scientist will come up with a cure one of these days. Just get a laser beam popped into yr ear for a minute and *pfft* it's gone.

I am very much looking forward to the day when I forget this is there

those of you who are musicians who have been through this, at what point/under what circumstances did you get back to playing music...?

Can't speak for myself but my tinnitus-suffering friend was out-of-commission for four months :(

shakes i haven't seen this until now but i have this too and i commiserate more than you can know

i haven't developed ringing in my ears (yet) -- the worst i get is sometimes when i bend or strain my neck muscles a certain way there'll be a weird distorted, almost ripping like sound in my ears. i kind of assume that's some fairly normal sign of hearing loss, but maybe somebody can scare me here and say it isn't. when i was younger and playing drums every day and going to shows every week, i'd wear earplugs consistently to both -- now that i do both on a more occasional basis i'm not as dutiful about the earplugs, which i know i'm gonna pay for.

this week i worked a few days at a place where there was some equipment producing a really high pitched ring, and a couple times it really freaked me out that maybe it was just my ears and i really had to stop for a second and make sure it wasn't.

feels like every day is such a fucking struggle

wish I could just get stoned and zone out and read some comics or something but I am scared to even try