I am looking for help. I have trawled the internet since the start of the year and gone to tewo ENTS but I am getting no where. I will try to keep my post as short and concise as possible, but want to include a lot of information - I really hope there is someone out there who can recognize my symptoms and offer me some hope and/or direction, as I just don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t overstate things generally, but I really feel like what I’m going through is going to be the death of me.

My problems started 7 months ago. After a once off rehearsal with a band (actually just me on guitar and a drummer) I had trouble hearing (the next day). Everything was muffled and not sharp. I became very worried and anxious as I didn’t understand what was happening. After about 16 or 17 days my ears ‘popped’, a day or two apart, as if I had been on a plane. I could hear again clearly in each ear.

However two days before they popped a roaring tinnitus began in my right ear and has never stopped. It began very suddenly, and faded in. It sounds very like the noise you get when you yawn, a roaring , windy, airy sound very low frequencies, or like the noise you hear on a plane of the air rushing past.

Over the months since the noise started, I developed soarness in my ear, and the right side of my face, as well as sinus like pain in my teeth and headaches. The pain has been getting worse and worse, and is now almost more annoying than the noise. It feels very tight in my right ear, I think the feeling is on my ear drum, like a clothes peg or something. It is there about half of the day, and becomes excruciating, and then sometimes the pain fades in to the background a little. Hot drinks and hot soup seem to help sometimes. But it comes back.

Additionally I frequently feel like something is rattling around in my ear. If I am on a bus, or in a car, I feel a vibration like something hitting off something else, near where I imagine my eustachian tube is.

Also my ear ‘pops’ all the time, not like if I have changed altitude. It is a rough crunching noise and feeling, and it is triggered by the slightest noise - such as someone speaking near me, putting a cup down, etc Just in my right ear.

Finally, three weeks ago the hearing in my right ear went crazy - the effects seem to be that of patulous eustachain tube. I could hear my own voice like an echo, and it seemed so very loud. When I spoke I could hear static and noise, and couldn’t hear outside things normally. It felt so straange. It passed after a few hours.

I have been to see two ENTs about it. The first, about two months after it started, said it was probably a virus, which had left me with this. There was nothing, he said he could do.

I went to a second, just last week, for a second opinion. He did a thorough exam, looked in my nose and ears. He said there was no sign of infection, and that the most likely explanation was damage to my cochlea. I asked him if this would cause the pain in my face and ear and he didn’t seem to think so. I asked him about the rattling feeling, which he said was probably always there, but that I was only noticing it now as I was concentrating on that area. I find this impossible to believe!

My theory is something along these lines; back at the very start when my hearing was muffled, my eustachian tubes were jammed shut due to shock(I hadn’t been around music or noise in quite a while before the rehearsal), but before they released, a part of the eustachian tube, at the ear end, opened up, or the muscle was damaged, and as a result it is not closing properly anymore. This is having creating problems with pressure in my ear which is causing the pain in my ear drum, and stopping me from hearing clearly.

This fits with my eustachian tube opening up comletely three weeks ago, as part of is always open?

Has anyone gone through this? Or can anyone tell me if my theory is even plausible? What do I do next? My life has been completely dominated by this curse. I feel so bad for all the people who go through serious ear problems like this, until you have experienced it you have no idea how frustrating and dehabilitating it can be.

Many thanks.