It's with me from morning until night - that horrible whistling in my ears. From when I wake up to when I go to sleep, it is constantly with me. A high-pitched shriek; loud enough that it is impossible to ignore; quiet enough that I can still hear just enough for the world to make sense. It follows me everywhere I go.
I went to the doctor to see what he had to say. He shone a light into my ears, peered into the recesses of my head. "You've got a lot of wax in there. I'll give you some drops to dissolve it. That should relieve any pressure in your Eustachian tubes."
For a week I followed the instructions on the bottle, dutifully putting in my drops every night before bed. At first there was silence, then fizzing as the medicine worked its way into my ears and turned the wax into a brown slurry that stained my pillows. But it didn't stop the whistling. I went back to the doctor.
"It's obviously something else," the doctor said. "We'll make an appointment with a specialist."
A month later, I was sitting in a soundproof booth, a pair of cushioned earphones clamped around my head. On the other side of the window was the audiologist. She smiled at me. "I'm going to do some tests. They're just standard tests to check your range of hearing. Once we get an idea of where you are against the baseline, we can concentrate the investigation."
I gave her a smile and a thumbs-up to show I understood. The test began.
At first it wasn't too bad. But as the test went on, the whistling in my ears got worse. It rose and fell, the volume increasing in some devilish feedback loop. I felt nauseous, my head reeling as I lost all sense of balance. I grabbed hold of the armrests of the chair and tried to keep from vomiting. When I came to, I was lying on the floor of the booth, the audiologist bent over me. She was ashen-faced and shaking. I hate to think how I looked.
"Are you alright?" she asked. She helped me to my feet. "That was some reaction. I've never seen that before."
She took me to the washroom so I could clean myself. Then I went home to await the report. It arrived a fortnight later.
Scan showed abnormalities in hearing range. Extreme reaction to high-frequency sound. Symptoms consistent with tinnitus ...
I didn't read any further.
It's with me from morning until night - that horrible whistling in my ears. From when I wake up to when I go to sleep, it is constantly with me. A high-pitched shriek; loud enough that it is impossible to ignore; quiet enough that I can still hear just enough for the world to make sense. It follows me everywhere I go.
