Who’s That Knocking At My Head?

Tinnitus: Explained, pronounced and hated

By Ed Goldman

It took deductive reasoning and a major “Duh!” moment for me to realize an endless construction project around the corner from my condo wasn’t the cause of all the thunka-thunking I kept hearing late at night. Spoiler alert: It was tinnitus, the always-mispronounced condition often mischaracterized as “ringing in the ears.”

If mine had started out as ringing, I must not have been aware of it. or my auricular doorbell had gone on the fritz and frustrated someone or something enough to start pounding on the door.

Phoning it in

The condition is annoying, I won’t kid you—but discovering what it was just in time saved me some serious embarrassment.

At first I thought it was my own air conditioner dying (it was, but silently—one might say stoically). Yet as I walked my hall in the wee hours, the thunka-thunking didn’t increase or decrease based on my proximity to the unit. The next night I thought it must be my neighbor’s AC making all that racket and, to my credit, I merely made a polite inquiry to him one morning.

“Have you, uh, heard a loud thunka-thunking in the night,” I asked, “sounding kinda like rocks tumbling along a faultline or, I dunno, a malfunctioning cooling system?”

He shook his head. “No, in fact I just had mine serviced. It runs really good.”

The noise went away for a few days so I figured the other likely suspect—that construction project going on a few blocks away, day and night—had ended. Then one night it got kind of loud again so I put in some earplugs. This was the “Duh!” moment I promised you: the silicon plugs only seemed to increase the volume. That’s when I realized, to misquote Shakespeare, the faultline didn’t lie in the stars, Brutus, but in myself.

Tinnitus (pronounced TINN-eh-tiss), I’ve since read, can be caused by things either very serious or relatively benign. The Mayo Clinic—there is not an equivalent Miracle Whip Clinic, so stop scrolling—reports tinnitus is “usually caused by an underlying condition, such as age-related hearing loss, an ear injury or a problem with the circulatory system.”

Not to be outdone, Johns Hopkins says the condition may be caused by “diabetes, migraines, thyroid disorders, anemia, and certain autoimmune disorders such as lupus and multiple sclerosis.” This wasn’t the reassurance I was seeking.

My doctor checked my ears and said my condition was likely caused by an allergy. She prescribed the ubiquitous Flonase, the mystery mist that every parent of my generation always had on hand during those wonderful years when your children aren’t actually children—they’re carriers. Of strep, pink-eye, chicken pox, and absurdly oversized school backpacks. (Of the latter, I’m not sure that my kid’s cohort turned out to be the best-read American generation in centuries. Many did develop scoliosis, however.)

I’d already begun to theorize that my condition started right after I attended an outdoor fundraiser at which the auctioneer used an ear-splitting (!) hand-mic and his own piercing voice to not only rivet our attention but also prevent attendees from talking amongst themselves. It was the first time I left an event because of the volume level—and let’s not forget I was at the actual Woodstock in 1969 and am still capable, to quote a nurse who examined me sometime back, “of hearing a mouse peeing on a blotter in an office down the corridor.”

As I write this, I’m living with the condition but still finding it hard to believe that when the non-painful thunka-thunking gets pretty loud, someone sitting beside me can’t hear it. I guess I don’t thunk aloud.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).