50 Million Tinnitus Sufferers Just Got Some Bad News and Some Good News
Fifteen years ago, almost as soon as she arrived in the Cleveland suburbs, her hometown, a high-pitched ringing disturbed Katie Hellmuth Martin’s sense of peace. She was looking forward to settling into the gentle sounds of summer she’d grown up with: birdcalls during the day, the relaxing cadence of crickets at night. Instead, her respite from the bustle of New York City was cut short within days, and she began to experience extreme sensitivity to all kinds of noise—a person chewing, a cat’s meow, her husband kissing her near the ear, even someone biting her nails, were suddenly excruciating to listen to. It felt “like lightning striking in your ear,” she says.
Today, she is only now planning to seek out a other Americans suffer from: tinnitus, a condition that, due to its many causes, is difficult to diagnose. It is often described by the sufferer as a howling, buzzing, whistling, clicking, or roaring in the ears; yet these sounds don’t come from any external source, if they can be said to be sounds at all (in most cases, they are perceptible only to the tinnitus sufferer). Martin has wondered if the loud rumble of New York’s subways were responsible. In any case, she says, “I just thought it was something I had to live with.”
