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Take that

I heard music this morning! I swear, it sounded perfectly like music; like an orchestra playing. Very jolly it was too.

Unfortunately the music was some form of tinnitus and despite my most positive thinking and imagining I’m still deaf. What cruel brains we have.

The tinnitus I’ve read about are sounds generated by our brains and the range of tinnitus sounds is wide and varied. My personal play list (if you can call it that) includes rushing water, humming (like a teleport machine from Star Trek in full flow), clinking bottles on a conveyor belt full of bottles moving along and various combinations of these. It can be loud, so loud that you can hardly think, so it’s tiring but you can still function. Or low, like a quiet ringing. It’s so irritating.

I never had a music tinnitus before though, it really cheered me up. But then I was saddened because it reminded me of how much I used to love music and what a pick me up it could be. Soon I started fantasizing about listening to music while doing the washing up, walking the dogs, cooking and dancing. But the music tinnitus didn’t last long and it was soon replaced by one of my regular tinnitus sounds. Drat!

Like deafness tinnitus is invisible to others, but when I tell my husband and sons that my tinnitus is loud, they realise I have to work harder at understanding them, know I get tired and find it hard to concentrate and those are the times where they all really look after me.