Thanks, Claire.
Yes, I believe you are correct, my circulation and nervous
system must have been involved in this. I am a highly strung
person by nature, and my blood pressure shoots up really
sky high and very easily under stress, even though I don't
really have hypertension.
I remember one day in 1988, when I was jobless and under
considerable stress, I felt kind of uneasy. I walked into a clinic,
and the doctor was alarmed when he took my BP reading -
180/90 ! He attributed it to stress though, and merely gave me
tranquilizers.
This is what I remember at the onset of the tinnitus on that
day in 1975. Again, I was under considerable tension, having
just left high school, and taking a high-pressured electronics
college course for which I was ill-suited. In all likelihood, my
blood pressure must have shot up past 200 that day. I recall
a mid-pitched continuous tone started in my right ear in the
afternoon. Being an intuitive person, I suspected my hearing
in the left ear had been affected. I took my tape player, turned
up fully the volume and tone without any cassette inside. This
plays only tape hiss then. The left ear was alright, but the
tape hiss in my right ear was muffled. I knew I had lost the
high frequency hearing in my right ear.
That night, I woke up with the whole room spinning, and
started vomiting violently. The nausea, vertigo and vomiting
continued for at least a week, after which it stopped. As
expected, my usual family GP was in the dark. Follow-up
with a hospital ENT ended up with a referral to another
hospital's neurosurgery unit. They didn't have CAT scans
or MRIs in those days - merely brain angiograms and crude
radio-isotope brain scans. They said they "saw" something
in the scans, but nothing was conclusive.
The tinnitus has continued to this day, with two aggravations
in early 1988 and 2001, which pushed it to even higher
frequencies. I'll post the transits and progressions for these
two events later.
Unfortunately, ginkgo biloba has just the opposite effect
- it makes it even louder and higher pitched. Tinnitus is
that complex a disorder. I've tried antiepileptic drugs like
carbamazepine (Tegretol) and gabapentin (Neurontin)
without results (tinnitus is an epileptic-like auditory
phenomenon). I think it's because I did not take a high
enough dose or not for long enough.
Neurontin is best combined with a benzodiazepine,
clonazepam (Klonopin) for best results, according to
the landmark study by Abraham Shulman of the Martha
Entenmann Tinnitus Center if you wish to try it. (I have
the Tinnitus Journal which published the full text of this
study.) However, one woman in a Yahoo group told me her
tinnitus actually started after she was put on these two drugs
for some other condition - that is just how complex and
baffling this thing can be.
Clonazepam (Klonopin), being a benzodiazepine,
will cause drowsiness, so you may wish to try Neurontin
by itself. Some studies find Neuronin alone ineffective,
but others find some benefit. I was taking just one 300 mg
cap a day, which was likely insufficient. You may wish to
start at one cap for a few days, then go up slowly to say
900 mg and see how it goes. Try to start the first dose at
night, as Neurontin is actually a GABA derivative and
will cause some drowsiness. If you can, try pushing up the
daily dosage to 1,800 mg (2 caps 3 times a day).
http://home.tampabay.rr.com/lymecfs/nfaq.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ctPlus&list_uids=14763233&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ctPlus&list_uids=11233342&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ctPlus&list_uids=16652071&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ctPlus&list_uids=17438255&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...ctPlus&list_uids=17106432&itool=pubmed_docsum
Chatting with a nurse on ICQ some years ago, she asked
me whether the vomiting I had during that period of onset
in 1975 was of a projectile nature - that is, if it flew out.
I answered in the affirmative. She replied that only one
condition results in this kind of projectile vomiting -
a stroke, and a hemorrhagic one at that, not a TIA (transient
ischemic attack). Thus, as mentioned, the extreme stress
which I was going thru must have shot up my blood pressure,
very likely past 200, (I remember my face and neck feeling
warm just before onset) that day. This would have burst blood
vessels in the brain, and the one or ones affected were
unfortunately that feeding the 8th or auditory nerve, which
in turn damaged it. I realize this sounds odd for for someone
of 17, but strokes can actually happen at any age.
As for coping, when it was aggravated those two times
in 1988 and 2001, I was virtually suicidal. In 1988, an
audiologist who was trying his masker on me told me he
had to turn it up to past 100 db to mask my tinnitus - that
was how loud it was.
The second time in 2001, another audiologist used his
equipment to actually measure my tinnitus, which showed
up as a red line on his graph, which was as high as the black
line, my normal hearing. He was shocked and told me
that my threshold was some 110 db, extremely loud and high
pitched. I wished he had a printer for that graph then.
I was thinking of trying TRT (Tinnitus Retraining Therapy) with
one other audiologist here in 2001, which uses a device
(not a masker) to introduce another sound into your ears,
and in the process habituate you to the tinnitus eventually.
Luckily, the body has a way of coping, and my brain somehow
eventually habituated to the sound by itself. It's like a person
who comes from the quiet countryside to live in the city. Initially
the city noise drives him crazy, but he eventually gets used
to it. It can still be quite debilating at times, and occasionally
the pitch shoots up like some laser gun, but I think I'll manage
to survive somehow.