How I learned to live with tinnitus

For more than a year, Sean Russell has suffered from a constant ringing in his ears. At first it affected all areas of his life – now he’s coming to terms with the condition

There is no known cure for tinnitus (Getty/iStock)

It was shortly before my 28th birthday, and the feeling of the drops in my left ear was oddly enjoyable. I listened to the sound of the wax dissolving and crackling, and then felt the warmth of the liquid as it made its way out of my newly clean ear. Why not clean the right one out, too? I tilted my head and put the drops in, and then came a rush as if my ear canal had collapsed: it sounded like I was under water.

I scrambled for tissue paper and dabbed at my ear, and leaned over the sink in the bathroom I shared with my housemate to allow the drops to fall out. And then it was done. My hearing returned to normal, but along with it, I noticed a ringing. What an idiot, I thought.

How to describe the sound? At its best, it sounds like air passing through a tiny hole; at its worst it is like a boiler humming in my head. Initially, I thought the sound would subside after a few hours or days, but it didn’t. It was unmistakeably there in every moment of my waking life – a light but constant ringing. Surely it wasn’t the drops; how could they possibly have caused this? So, then, had it been there before the ear drops? The sound was so subtle after all, and living in London it’s sometimes hard to work out what silence is, so it’s possible I had just never noticed it. Cue late-night panic-googling of tinnitus.