The Insect Rager In My Head by Robin Gaines

Relax, it says in the pamphlet. Sure, like that’s possible, because for the past five years, I’ve had a family of crickets living in my head. As tenants go, they went from acceptable to unbearable. Acceptable, like on a summer night with the bedroom window open, unable to sleep, counting the seconds between chirps before drifting off to Snoozeville. Not anymore. I’m not an entomologist, but I would bet someone a white noise machine that Mr. and Mrs. Gryllidae [Latin for cricket] breed like rodents because now it sounds as if their offspring number in the tens of thousands. I lay in bed at night listening to their screeching back and forth, visualizing them in the cornfield of my brain, drunk on the moon and sweet decaying earth and wonder if it’s the males’ mating call. There is no closing the window to the cricket chorus soundtrack looping between my ears.

And yes, it is all in my head it says in the pamphlet my audiologist gave me, in the Limbic system to be exact, and not my imagination gone wild. It’s tinnitus. The Brits and the American Medical Association pronounce it TIN-ni-tus. The average American layperson like myself pronounces it tin-NYE-tus. More than 50 million people in the United States suffer from the condition caused by noise-induced or age-related hearing loss, middle ear obstructions, certain prescription drugs, head and neck trauma, sinus problems, traumatic brain injury, and TMJ (temporomandibular joint disorder). Many returning veterans, about 34 percent from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, are diagnosed with the condition due to bombs blowing up and gunfire. Musicians and those in the music business pre-earplug days have been known to suffer from it. None of these situations apply to me. 

*****

I call my daughter late one night as she’s finishing up her various after-show jobs. I hear the rustle of ice and music in the background. “I thought the show would be over,” I say. 

“It is,” she says. “I’m in the V.I.P. tent backstage. Some of the bands are hanging out, playing guitars. I’m restocking the coolers full of beer.”

“Well, be careful.” Every mom’s refrain, or at least, this one’s. My daughter is in her late twenties, married, and living like a vagabond (with her newly minted husband) traveling around the country creating live art acrylic paintings at country music festivals. It’s not heavy metal. It’s bluesy Chris Stapleton to the pop-ish Maren Morris with a mix of country crooners like Eric Church and Jason Aldean up on stage. Hardly sets the scene for ear splitting noise. 

“I always am,” she says. “Gotta go. We leave early for Vegas.”

“Okay. Be careful.” Wait, I already said that. “Wear ear plugs,” I say. “Hold on. Vegas? As in Las Vegas? Where is there room for an outdoor festival in Vegas?”

“Right on the strip. Right in the middle of the action.”

*****

At the start of my war with the crickets, I told myself it will eventually go away. A few days, maybe a week, and then silence would return. The same amount of time it took for the screeching to subside after attending a rock concert wearing earplugs. I’d curse the minutes-long guitar solos of my youth or the constant screaming from my daughters and their friends at an In Sync show that seemed to linger like a banshee’s keening. But this was different. While I waited patiently for the quiet, the insect rager grew louder.

So, on a balmy 33-degree afternoon in February I sat in a stuffy conference room in a University of Michigan facility on the west side of Ann Arbor hoping a class on tinnitus might offer some insight on evicting the crickets. Two facilitators alternated throughout the two hours explaining everything one needs to know about the condition except the one crucial question I had. Why? Why, when I have none of the other “typical” causes, do I have it? 

My fellow tinnitusians and I were given handouts and watched a Powerpoint  presentation about basic anatomy and the function of the ear, categories of hearing loss, the definition of tinnitus (the perception of sound in the absence of an external stimulus, explained in one handout), sound tolerance, emotional responses to the ringing—like fear and shock—something is wrong and I can’t do anything about it. 

Then, finally, the reason why we really all ponied up $30 and gave up a Friday afternoon: “What Can You Do About It?”

Apparently, not much.

“Tinnitus bothers some people and not others,” Emily, the clinical audiologist and lecturer, said to the class participants.

Well, clearly my classmates and I were the bothered sort, or why the hell would we be there?

*****

I was sitting in the class because my doctor suggested I learn more about the chronic condition I would eventually come to realize was never going away. 

“I think I fried my ears from all the concerts I saw,” I told my doctor in the winter of 2018 when the screeching hadn’t disappeared after a few months. As a music journalist, I wrote reviews of live shows, and as a fan, attended hundreds over the decades. Still, I wore earplugs. My husband is a concert promoter. My kids have all worked in various capacities at shows. Live music has paid our bills.

“There might be something more serious causing it,” the doctor said.

Gulp. Here we go. My days of dodging middle-aged health issues are over.

A CT scan later that week ruled out an acoustic neuroma, a pesky benign tumor that grows on the nerves leading from the inner ear to the brain. 

“Whew!” I said, relieved. “So, when will the crazy crickets pack up and leave my head?” I asked the audiologist. 

“That’s an unknown,” she said. “Tinnitus is a symptom, not a disease.”

“A symptom of what?”

“That’s the unknown.”

Armed with a side effect and no disease, I left her office with a “good luck” and a phone number for the class offered through the University of Michigan’s Department of Otolaryngology.

*****

“Put your ear up to my ear,” I told my husband one night while lying next to him in bed. “Can you hear the screeching?” No, he could not. Us lucky tinnitus sufferers get to suffer alone. At least with a broken foot ensconced in a cast or blood spilling from a wound, the world knows you’re hurting.

It was no surprise to learn crickets are nocturnal, so it makes sense that night is when the tinnitus is worse. When I’m out and about during the day and evening, my thoughts are on the people I engage with or the mundane errands of life. In the dark, in bed, in a silent room, the symphony of Gryllidae begin their crescendo and that’s when the tossing and turning dance begins.

And the why me chorus as I hear my husband snore next to me. Why me and not him? The man whose ears have suffered the decibel levels of Metallica, Moterhead, AC DC, and the Foo Fighters since the 1980s. Without ear plugs. Without hearing loss. It’s unfair. Fucking unfair. Part of me wishes there was a charging port at the back of my head where I could hook up my tinnitus soundtrack to the Sonos system and spread the misery around the kitchen, watch my family abandon drinks and plates of food to cuff their ears to the agonizing sound. “See,” I’d say, “now you know what it feels like.”

*****

Emily, our audiology facilitator went on to explain that the goal of the class is not to make the ringing go away (it wasn’t?) but to learn to ignore it like the steady hum of a refrigerator in the other room. In other words, deal with it, people. This is called habituation. “The diminishing of a physiological or emotional response to a frequently repeated stimulus.” Written in red text on the Powerpoint screen. 

Habituation is all about side-stepping awareness of the symptom into soothing ignorance. Yes, it sucks, but move on.

We, the obedient, turned to the next page of our handout where we continued to read along with the facilitator.

“The primary goal of tinnitus therapy is NOT to make the tinnitus “go away” —but instead to stop the awareness cycle.” We are told to choose a therapy signal—a babbling brook perhaps—and then to find a “mixing point,” the tinnitus a little louder than the softer babbling brook.

Frankly, they lost me at habituation, because I couldn’t get past the feeling they were shaming us sufferers for potentially allowing the tinnitus to ruin our relationships, our sleep, our lives. “Find a sound that you enjoy and stick with it,” a line reads in one of the handouts. How about silence? That’s the sound I enjoy. The sound I want to stick with. To wake up to, to go to bed with. To hear a car drive past, voices in the hallway, the furnace kicking on, without the screeching overdub. 

I sat there fuming over my Limbic system—similar to my crankiness about having to accept middle-aged eyesight and achy joints—now I had to deal with that part of my brain’s network of nerves failing at placating my drives—think sex, hunger, and worry—and my moods, like pleasure, anger, and fear.   

Hmm. The last one caused me to pause.

I shifted in the plastic conference room chair and did the math. 

Toward the end of our two hours of Tinnitus 101, I asked this question: “If we don’t fit into any of the categories for why we’re so lucky to have this condition could a trauma have caused it?”

“I was in a bad car accident,” the lady next to me said, grinning hopefully up at the facilitator for some kind of explanation. 

“Any type of trauma could cause it,” said Allie, the other audiologist.

“What about emotional trauma?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she said.

I smiled. Bingo.  

*****

On October 2, 2017, I padded into the kitchen to turn on the coffee machine and let Uncle Muscles out to pee. Mussy is my three- legged granddog. A stubborn, snarly, four or five-year-old, red heeler rescue that belongs to my daughter and son-in-law who I had been dog sitting off and on since June while the kids were out on the road. The Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas was the last festival of the tour.  

Mussy and I were seasoned roommates by fall and respectful of each other’s morning rituals. His was to sniff the chilled air before descending the porch steps and hobbling through the dewy grass toward the lake—eerily still and steely blue that Monday morning—only to circle a spot three or four times before doing his business and watching to make sure I was there to protect him against something. What, I didn’t know. I still had the porch blanket wrapped over my pajamas when we came inside. I dished out Mussy’s food, hid his pills in cheese slices, refilled his water bowl and then poured myself a cup of coffee and picked up my silenced cell phone. It was lit up with texts.

Gunman opens fire on thousands of concert-goers on the Las Vegas Strip . . .

Death toll rises, hundreds injured in wake of shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival . .  

CNN BREAKING NEWS—Las Vegas. Multiple casualties. Hundreds injured at a country music festival last night near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

I dropped to my knees, the blanket stole buffering my fall as I shrieked and wailed, sending Mussy slinking away down the hall, abandoning his breakfast, unable to process what had become of our normally quiet, contemplative morning. My hands shook. My thumbs stuck to the screen where I dropped fat tears as I hurriedly scrolled through texts from family, 

friends: Are E and R okay? Call me. I’m worried. Have you heard anything? OMG, turn on the news. Are E and R working that show?

Then all the way down, past the chaos, past the questions, past the horrific what ifs scrolling through my head: 

Mom, we’re safe. Phone’s about to die. Will call later.

*****

Relax! The last page of the tinnitus handout tells us again, and yes, with an exclamation point. “Do some slow breathing or try out some mindfulness techniques, etc. This teaches your brain that the tinnitus is one of the sounds you hear—not the only sound you hear, and that there is no threat.”

No threat.  

*****

My daughter and son-in-law were backstage in the production office waiting for final lists of after-show duties. Jason Aldean was the last act of the night and only minutes into “When She Says Baby” when most assumed the pops heard inside the field were fireworks that had been set off. It wasn’t fireworks but rapid succession gunfire from an A-15 automatic rifle. “We barricaded ourselves in the trailer’s bathroom thinking there were multiple shooters on the field,” my son-in-law said when I went to them the next day at their home in Michigan. They stayed in place until bullets pinged and ricocheted off the metal structures of the stage next to their trailer and he told my daughter they had to make a run for it. For nearly two hours, they ran and hid behind bushes and inside buildings while the wounded were loaded into the backs of pickup trucks. This, amidst the carnage and chaos of 22,000 people trying to flee a fenced-in area in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip. “The blood was everywhere,” my son-in-law said, loud and animated while the walls of the small kitchen seemed to close in. My baby girl’s mouth didn’t move. Her eyes were vacant as if she had stared too long at the monster and the monster had memorized her face.

Ten minutes of gunfire killed 58 people and injured over 800 from bullets or shrapnel. 

The youngest killed was 20. The oldest, 67. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Still, nothing changed. Since 1999, according to The Violence Project, 2,416 people have been killed or injured in mass shootings in this country. Crickets then. Crickets now. Both, the non-screeching kind. 

The United States is the world’s outlier in firearm possession and gun-related deaths. Another mass shooting in the news elicits the all-too familiar habit-forming yawn. It’s a version of collective habituation to the horror of another young-adult white male with a legally purchased AK-15 mowing down people in schools, shopping centers, churches, office buildings, movie theatres, nightclubs, and concert venues. The hum of that running refrigerator of ignorance, to our mixing point of turning up the soothing sounds of complacency to gun violence. 

Shame on the elected officials with A+ ratings from the NRA who stonewall gun-safety legislation because of greed. Money over lives. And shame on all of us who elected these murderers. 

*****

After the Q & A portion of the class and before we all went our separate ways equipped on how to deal with the screeching, ringing, buzzing, hissing of our side effects, we practiced the mindfulness breathing technique: “Use the 7-4-10 rule: breathe in for 7 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, and slowly release for 10 seconds,” Allie encouraged us. “It works for a lot of people.”

Then we’re told about the dietary no nos, all of life’s elixirs that might make the tinnitus worse—salt, sugar, tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol—though there seemed, in those waning weeks of fall, never enough wine to assuage the rage in my soul and the guilty gratitude to the gods for sparing my child, her husband, and for that maggot piece of garbage taking his own life so he never had a voice in place of all the others he silenced that night. 

“Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.” So says Keith Richards. Music brought all those souls together in Las Vegas. Just like it did at the Pulse nightclub, Manchester Arena, and Le Bataclan in Paris. Music was the uniter. In its path music lifts people into its eye and intensifies our aliveness into a common denominator greater than ourselves. In my bones I do believe it. 

But after the horror of Route 91 and the crickets moved in some things were just too hard to listen to. Physically and mentally. For a while I gave up NPR and the Spectrum for the real jazz station—jazz the only music with kinetic energy to elevate above the ringing nonsense. Its voicelessness was more authentic to me than the news. Jazz while driving. Jazz on my iPhone when I was wide awake at 3:30 in the morning and the 7-4-10 breathing wasn’t working. All conciliations much like the plastic crosses, flowers, teddy bears, and mini-American flags piled near the places of death and destruction. 

I wear maskers now. Hearing aid devices that are programmed to emit pink noise and drown out some of the screeching. And I’m on a wait list for a new tinnitus therapy recently approved by the FDA that involves mild electrical pulses to the tongue. Crazy? Maybe. But so is the rhetoric that wrongly assumes that gun-safety legislation, if passed, allows the government to go door-to-door confiscating legal firearms.  

My daughter and son-in-law haven’t worked a concert since Las Vegas. They never talk about the night they saw dead bodies in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip. 

*****

Whether the crickets are a symptom of emotional fright years ago or my rage that my daughter and son-in-law had to witness something akin to a war zone in this country, I’ll 

never know. What I do know is the experience of what could have been has left me bereft in ways I still can’t distill, I can’t articulate. They came through it alive, unharmed, in one piece. I know. But still.

Back to that day. Late in the afternoon on October 2, after I had finally spoken to my daughter and knew she and her husband were okay, Mussy and I sat on the porch steps looking out on the washed white light of fall as it slanted over the lake, smelled the autumnal mold of decaying leaves, watched the bumblebees in a frenzy in the catmint along the pavers, and heard the cows lowing over in the large field down the road—the moo sound my daughter likes to mimic into a low groan, mom. 

It was like the end of any other day, except it wasn’t. 

Robin Gaines’s first novel, Invincible Summers, was a Shelf Unbound 2018 Best Indie Notable 100 Book and a 2018 runner-up in General Fiction at the Florida Book Festival. She has just finished her second novel. Recent essays have appeared in Beyond the Plots Anthology and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She works as an editor for Wide Open Writing and writes a book blog at www.robingaines.net.