Creepy - Day 27 - Tinnitus

Episode Date: October 27, 2019

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Creepy Presents The 31 Days of Horror Day 27 Tonightas Written by Delaney I Rose Reddit username the screaming stopped and narrated by Alicia Atkins. Every time I'm at a party and things get awkward or too quiet,

everyone staring into the hunch punch and their red plastic cups, we wind up playing Never Have I Ever. The rules are that each person must say something that has never happened to them. And, if someone else has experienced it, the participant has to take a swig of their drink. The first person to run out of drink loses, and is usually smashed. I often have the bittersweet honor of winning,

since I haven't done much, but I have a trick I can use to get every single person to take a swig of their drink. Never have I ever heard silence. Bullshit! They always protest, but it's not. I was born with tinnitus, a condition where you hear a tone that isn't there.

It's different for everyone. It can sound like an electrical humming or beeping, a ringing, crickets, static, even frogs. You learn to tell it apart from reality. It's amazing how you can ignore something like that, too, as you can learn to ignore so many other sounds. Your air conditioner, your shut-in neighbor's low mutter of a TV, the only difference is that, with those noises, you can escape.

It gets worse the older you get. There's no real cure for it either, but sufferers do a lot of things to try to cope. Some find relief in white noise. Others learn to ignore it. And there are some medications and therapies, but nothing has ever worked for me. I've invested in white noise machines and tried some fringe solutions like special diets of little but spinach leaves and vitamins. All are placebos. For most of my life, my tinnitus was a quiet ringing that only really bugged me at night.

While it sounds rising volume over the years caused me to seek relief, I could drown the sound out with fans, white noise or soft music, and sleep through the night. A few months ago, the sound changed. When I was alone in my apartment, I heard something I couldn't place. It sounded like an alarm of some kind going off. A pinging, a pulsing. It wasn't my computer, phone, TV, fridge, or smoke detector. It wasn't anything at all, but it followed me everywhere.

I finally tried plugging my ears and the noise became so loud I couldn't stand it. The noise itself practically forced my fingers out of my ears. Shit, I thought. That's just me. For the first couple of weeks, it gave me a temper. I lashed out of my girlfriend if she so much has made a small complaint. Can you turn your music down? Why is the TV so loud?

Can you please tell me what's going on? She's a know-it-all. It's one of the things I love most about her. I love how smart and knowledgeable she is, and the grin she gets on her face when she talks about something she cares about. But it can be hard when you're suffering to be asked things like, have you tried disignoring it? Or listen to her pontificate about some obscure study the government did in the 80s.

I didn't want to tell her about my problem because I knew she'd offer solutions I'd tried a hundred times before. and I knew it would kill me to see her face fall as I rejected her every suggestion or interrupted a tangent to let her know that, yes, I had tried noise therapy, and yes, I had tried holding a tablespoon of horse radish under my tongue. Besides, she was a health freak already. She convinced me to eat things I despised, like wheatgrass, keen wad, quince. She loved making those horrible green smoothies and had been convincing me to drink at least one a day. She had opted to two since I started getting a temper. I'd never actually seen her drink one of those monstrosities herself, but she swore by them.

I didn't want to risk having to drink more of those smoothies or have them replaced with something worse. I couldn't tell her. When it comes to tinnitus, I'm the know-it-all anyway. I've heard of people puncturing their eardrums or begging their doctors to deaf in them to get rid of this. I've also heard of that not working. and people being trapped in a world with just that noise,

because it's not related to your eardrums, or even to your hearing, at all. Some go insane. Some kill themselves. When you know you have to live with something like this, especially when you're suffering, it's amazing how you adapt. Just a few weeks, and the pinging and aching was old news. I told myself this is just how life is now,

and then if I wanted to keep living, I had to cope. I was back to smiling and laughing, even listening to music and the television at a reasonable volume. It only took another week for things to get worse. I woke one night when someone called my name, far away, as if from another room.

Even though it sounded distant, I figured it was my girlfriend. I turned to her, but she was fast asleep. Maybe she talked in her sleep, and I'd never noticed it? You know she doesn't talk in her sleep. It was behind me. Who are you?

I whispered. You know. Something was in my head, responding audibly to my thoughts. It was staticy, like it came through an old television. One day when I came home from work, I decided to tell my girlfriend, so she would at least stop worrying. She was sitting on the couch with a medical textbook spread on our lap, studying for another exam in her never-ending list of medical school exams.

I sat next to her and told her about the voice, about the pinging. To my surprise, she beamed. She looked thrilled to be a part of my universe and was convinced there was something she could do. Her eyes flitted around her textbook as she flipped page after page, scouring for something, anything she could do to help. She started offering solutions before I, I could even finish describing my symptoms. As I feared, she met my problems with so much helpful glee that it was hard to squash.

I pretended that all her proposed solutions were working. White noise, special headphones, strange tea. T tasted like metal. More vitamins? I pretended it all worked, that the voice was quieter and then gone. But it wasn't. Now it shouted. Liar!

Liar! Around her, it got even worse. It made it hard to speak. Every time I opened my mouth, the screeching became almost unbearable. For weeks, it went on like this. The pinging became disjointed, began seeing tall, shadowy figures on the walls and outside windows. I had headaches my girlfriend told me were probably from the cleansing tea.

She also said that one of the side effects was hallucinations. I don't know why anyone would trade visual hallucinations for auditory, but I drank on to please her. It also made my pee dark, dark brown, almost black. She said that was normal. But, as I said, it's amazing what you can learn to live with. All those horrible things became a part of my world,

until yesterday. Yesterday, I found something that works. I found a cure for tinnitus. It started when a button fell off my shirt, and I went to my girlfriend's sewing kit to find a needle and thread to repair it. The voice mumbled unintelligible, but loudly, as I fumbled with its sewing tools, trying to find a thread that perfectly matched the color of the thread for the rest of my buttons.

When I was pricked by a loose needle, the voice shrieked, and I gritted my teeth. You're killing me! I shouted, and to my surprise, I heard the voice do something it hadn't done since I heard it the first time. It cried. I gazed at the small injury on the tip of my finger and squeezed it to push out a drop of blood. The voice sobbed. It was nice to hear someone else cry. I smiled, and I rifled through the kit until I found an unopened box of small pens my girlfriend had bought when she thought she'd have the time to sew her own clothes.

I grabbed the pen from the box and slowly slid it at an angle into my inner ear. Pushing through the cartilage is the hardest part, and it's hard not to cringe when you feel a pen's straight bone. But it worked. The voice cried a little quieter, but then I realized it was beginning to fade. Every few hours, I add a pen to my inner ear. I would do it more often, but the pain can be difficult to bear. It hurts a lot to press through the thick layers of flesh and try to find an angle that works.

But it doesn't hurt any worse than when the doctors try to find a vein in your arm to draw blood. I only have one concern. My fingers aren't small enough to go in as deep as I like. I'm already running out of reachable inner ear. I don't know what I'll do when I can no longer reach. But for now, every few hours, the world gets a little quieter. It's worth the pain to have a little peace. Even if the tall shadowy figures I used to see in the distance are coming off the walls

and get closer to me with every pen. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us. At CreepyPod on Twitter, Instagram. Email us at creepypies. All stories told on this podcast can be found at creepypasta wiki.com and are protected by a creative commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated.