TLDR: i am really seriously struggling right now and if i seem off in the next few days and weeks (and perhaps months and years) then this is why. details below. on the night of november 2nd i noticed something was wrong with my ears; my tinnitus (which i've had since i was 16) was MUCH louder than ever before, had spread to both ears, and was making it impossible to sleep. i eventually passed out from exhaustion, and hoped it would just go away the next day it got to my birthday earlier this week, and the sound had actually gotten worse - i could hear it all the time, even with loud white noise playing, even with music, even over the fridge sound, even over conversations with friends, all i can hear and focus on is how abnormally loud it has gotten. literal worst birthday present possible fast forward a few more days and my doctor thinks that what may have caused this is that i might have been hit with a side effect from other medication i was taking at the end of october. the problem is that this isn't reversible and you literally just have to live with it. i dug through a ton of different studies from the last few years and found that there's one singular study showing a possible link between steroid usage and mild improvement to symptoms of my nature IF taken immediately after symptoms started, so i pressed my doctor to give me a prescription for them at first my doctor denied the request but i went back the next day, talked him through the paper, and we spoke to an emergency ENT doctor. we landed on the following: i am going to take a pretty high dose of steroids over the next week, and we're going to basically cross our fingers that it helps. we're also going to PRAY that it doesn't make things WORSE, which is unfortunately a possibility (which terrifies me). this will have side effects - my doc has warned me that it will very likely absolutely crater my mood, i may become irritable very easily, i may feel depressed to the point of being suicidal, or i might dodge many of those side effects because the duration is quite short. we're going to have to play it by ear (..... ffs lol) on top of this, i have been totally unable to sleep, and the exhaustion is really catching up to me, and making me even more depressed, so my doctor has also given me a short course of vallium to take - so on top of my concerns about the steroids, i now have to make sure i don't get addicted to these lmao - but i am praying that they can ease my anxiety about it all and give me some relief then on top of all that, the doctor has also recommended i get my earwax cleaned out to take that extra factor out of the equation (though we already know the wax is not causing the tinnitus), but to do that, you need to use olive oil drops for 5-7 days to help soften the wax first. the problem is that every time i've done this in my life, it has clogged my ears and meant that they are blocked to all external sounds, and the exact same thing has happened to me here. my wax has sealed up my ears on and off over the past 72hrs, and so i can ONLY hear the tinnitus when that happens, with no other external sound able to even partly mask it. i literally had to ask the doctor in the pharmacy to repeat themself 6 times in a row because i couldn't hear them over the sound of the tinnitus through my blocked ears, i'm more or less just fully deaf when that happens i was with friends on my birthday which made it a bit easier to cope and distract myself, but now i'm home and on my own it is really cripplingly depressing. i'm really concerned that this is going to be something which affects me this way for life, which is not a healthy way to look at it at all, but it's hard to imagine anything else right now when it's so loud that it stops me sleeping completely and even wakes me up because it's so loud - even with white noise etc playing to mask it, it makes no difference, and that's really easy to catastrophize and worry about the long term being just untenable. i look back on videos of myself from as recently as 1 week ago and i feel like i am looking at a different person - i never realised how quickly everything could feel like it could change for the worse, and i am so jealous of my old self and what my hearing was like when i just had normal tinnitus, not this terrible new curse which feels like it will be impossible to adapt to. i'm going to try over the next few days to do some normal stuff like make some videos, and see if there's any places where i can distract myself enough to not think about it - as part of that, it would be really helpful if we could avoid bringing it up in my stream chats or stuff like that because that's just gonna make me think about it all over again, and the trick right now is that i need to basically train my brain to tune it out. it's going to be a mammoth task - it was way easier when i had my old tinnitus but this is so much louder it's insane - and so not talking about it on stream etc 24/7 is gonna be important for helping me "forget" it's happening basically. black ops 7 might be my absolute saving grace in this regard -- i can only hope so that's where i'm at. i am finding even basic stuff like eating really difficult because it sort of feels pointless to take care of myself when it feels like i am going to be destroyed by this regardless without a single thing i can do to stop it, but i guess that's what the vallium is for. maybe it will help get me out of this hole even just in the immediate short term. we will see i suppose. gonna put on a brave face from here, but i am really struggling and i am really sorry if roid-ragelo makes an appearance or i don't seem like myself anymore. i have been trying my best to just power through it, but this is really hard to go through alone.