This is an interesting story about this individual’s introduction to the world of tinnitus.  I am posting this here on our website because it is a great example of how one small moment in time can change everything.  This story describes, in very interesting details, how a simple prank by good friends affected this persons hearing forever.  While a tinnitus cure could restore a single innocent moment in time, for now we continue to treat our tinnitus symptoms with the best available options while researchers work frantically for the magic bullet that might end tinnitus forever.

While I can only speculate as to whether or not the foreboding premonition was real or only added to spice up the story, it’s still has an eerily haunting feel for me and probably anyone else that suffers from tinnitus symptoms, particularly the ringing in the ears variety.  We search the Internet regularly looking for anything new or interesting about tinnitus, yet this story grabbed my attention immediately, and I knew almost instantly that I had to share it on our website.

Here is what Roger Ling had to say about his experience with tinnitus at www.stationr.org:

Cure Tinnitus (www.sunshinereflections.wordpress.com)

A lifetime ago we had a friend named Biz whose father owned some property with an abandoned farmhouse in a place called Pleasant Grove, high on a mountaintop in Jackson County, Alabama. Once in a while we would go out to sweep the dust, mow back the grass, and spend the night out there in the woods. The house wasn’t much more than a shack with a sagging front porch, a musty little kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. There were bees living inside the outer wall of one bedroom, and you could hear them in there during the night. We’d stay up drinking warm beer and playing cards before retiring cautiously, careful not to make too much noise and alarm the bees.

One night around 1984 Annie and I were out at the cabin with a couple of friends. I have a picture of Annie holding Uno cards, a big Budweiser there on the table. I had been drinking a few beers myself and during a break in the cards I went out onto the front porch, my Walkman playing Roger Waters. There was a tree growing right next to the porch that almost begged to be climbed, so up I went into the night. No sooner had I settled on a branch high above the roof when a picture flashed unbidden into my mind.

I saw a dark, hooded figure moving through the woods behind the house, somewhere out there in the distance, coming toward us in silence and darkness. I saw no face or features, just a man-like figure threading through the trees, but what I saw in my mind was pure evil, Satan himself.

Funny how the mind plays tricks, how an idea so simple could be so powerful. I had been alone in the dark countless times, up in trees at Percy Warner Park in Nashville, on the beaches of Mississippi at 3 AM, alone in the woods, caves, in graveyards and empty buildings, and I tended to take it all at face value. What you saw was what you got; I wasn’t scared of the dark and a little proud of that. But this split second of imagination, a moment of video that for whatever reason played in my head, frightened me. That vision of a dark, evil figure moving toward me scared me enough that I immediately came down from the tree to go back inside with the others.

I have to confess it was years later that I made the connection between that vision and what came next, the sad and stupid little event that changed my life subtly but forever for the worse. Like most turning points it was a tiny thing, nothing dramatic despite the fact that it involved a gun. In those days one of my friends liked to play with a muzzle-loader rifle, and he had left it there in the living room.

I have never cared much for guns, and had no real knowledge or interest in a muzzle loader, but in idle boredom I picked up the rifle. I was being cautious enough that I would never have pointed the gun anywhere near a person, but for reasons I don’t understand I hefted it up towards my shoulder and sighted down the barrel at a window. I wasn’t even holding it right, kind of up in the air and forward; my finger was nowhere near the trigger, but I’ll accept responsibility for picking the thing up. What happened was my fault. In that senseless moment as I stood there someone reached over and pulled the trigger. Blam! The gun went off and I was sure I had blasted out the window, but the guys were laughing at my expression of horror, knowing they had just pulled a good joke. The barrel had been empty, no bullet or gunpowder there, but the small charge in the flintlock, intended to set off the real blast, had been present. When that little charge went off like a firecracker, it was no more than an inch or two from my right ear.

My ear was ringing like crazy from the concussion, but of course I didn’t think much of it at the time. It was still ringing when Annie and I crawled into bed later. To my surprise it was still ringing the next morning. That was almost twenty years ago now, and the ringing in my ear has never stopped, not for an instant. Sometimes it rings quietly in the background. Often it’s the single loudest noise I can hear.  You can read the rest of the original article here.

Even if you don’t suffer from tinnitus, you probably still find this story to be an interesting one.  However, if you experienced anything similar or even if your tinnitus came on differently, you were probably like me and hung on every word with a heavy weight, knowing and feeling exactly what Roger felt when his experience occurred on that in Alabama.

If you are new to our website, then you will want to continue exploring all of our information and articles, but if you are a repeat visitor, then you already know that we are focused on tinnitus and tinnitus research and will continue to search weekly for anything new or exciting when it comes to finding a tinnitus cure.

While a tinnitus cure could restore a single innocent moment in time, for now we continue to treat our tinnitus symptoms with the best available options.  We have used this treatment information personally with great results, and we now know and understand that lifestyle and food intake can both directly affect the rate at which our tinnitus symptoms occur.  If you are searching for tinnitus relief, you might want to spend some time looking at this tinnitus treatment option to see if it might help you as well!