and those with normal hearing.

I actually have FIVE different tinnitus sounds! As a girl I had just one, but over time new ones have added themselves to the old ones.

On my deaf/hard of hearing site (I'm Listening as Hard as I Can!) I have a couple of articles about tinnitus that might help you make peace with it:

"The Sounds of Silence"
http://deafnotdumb.homestead.com/tinnitus.html

"The Sound the Universe Makes Is Really Just Tinnitus"
http://deafnotdumb.homestead.com/om.html

BTW, some time after I posted that "Sounds of Silence" article, in which I suggest "making friends with your tinnitus," discussion threades popped up on tinnitus support groups with names like "Making Friends with Tinnitus." I suspect they borrowed their names from my article, since it is a rather idiosyncratic phrase, don't you think?

in its entirety--as the starting point for a discussion thread. I am going now to check out the other pages to see if they are based on my article.

severely hearing impaired people have told me that when they could not get their bosses, friends, spouses, or other family members to understand about their hearing impairment or about what sorts of accommodations they need in order to be able to fully participate in family or group get togethers or at work, sending them to my website helped a lot of recalcitrant "hearies" to understand how unnecessarily hard (and unpleasant) they make it for us when the slightest effort would make our lives so much easier.

About once a month here at DU I used to post a plea for other members to please, please, please include a brief summary of the main point of a video so that we deafies could have some idea of what it was about. Closed captioning on most videos is ridiculously bad. Usually there is little connection between the words in the captioning and the words being spoken in the video, but most hearies, since they don't need to use CC, have no idea of how hopelessly bad it is. Unfortunately, when I request a brief summary I often get back a snappish, "Why don't you just turn on the closed captioning?"

Understand, I am not requesting a transcript, just a brief heads up--one or two sentences--about the subject of the video.

but when I do, it's severe. Very loud. A lot like cicadas, for those of you who live where they are common. And yet, as loud as the tinnitus sounds are, they don't interfere with my normal hearing.

It's like a high pitched whine, like the sound you hear when you used to turn on an old TV set.

I had chemo ten years ago (for breast cancer) and I was told that tinnitus is often a side effect.

Very often I have a hard time understanding people talking, especially in a restaurant or store where there's a lot of background noise. I've been to a hearing specialist, but they say there's nothing you can do for it. And my insurance will not cover hearing aids. Very discouraging! to say the least.

And, well, it crushed my head (which is full of rocks evidently). A consequence was my left inner ear was destroyed rendering me deaf with tinnitus. To me it sounds live I’ve just been punched really hard flat in the nose. It gets worse with loud background noises.

Since this happened I’ve learned how common tinnitus is and there seems to be myriad causes for it.

I’ve resolved that this is simply my life now.