Tinnitus: ‘There’s a life before and a life after it’

James Skaife, 30, from Sheffield has had tinnitus for as along as he can remember.

He says he first realised other people couldn’t hear a ringing in their heads aged seven or eight.

“I talked to my parents about it and they said I had an ear infection when I was a baby. I can’t remember the day it started but I can remember the day I noticed it.

“About five or six years later I started having an introspective crisis about how I was experiencing life differently and that was hard to wrap my head around.”

He says the biggest challenge had been learning to cope with the condition mentally.

“It is trying to figure out how to live with it. But it came a lot from talking to people.

“When I was 17, I had a friend who was colour-blind. He dealt with it by realising the way he experienced the visual world was like no one else.

“It was so unique to him that it didn’t matter if he was colour-blind or not because he was never going to see the world another way.”

While he says he is lucky, because his tinnitus doesn’t wake him up at night or cause him pain, as a music fan, he does have to be careful about headphone volume and seeing live music.

He says: “Aged 14, the doctor told me I was more likely to get hearing loss because if I wanted to listen to stuff the way other people do I would be tempted to turn the volume up and that would lead to hearing loss. And I’ve internalised that quite a lot. So, if anything, I listen to music too quietly.”

Now he says his nightclubbing days are behind him – but he still experiences some problems seeing live music.

“Because I hear the ringing all the time I don’t know when I’ve pushed it too far.

“It’s better at festivals because it’s a bit more open, but indoors is more intense. That’s when you get the real ear ringing after you leave the building.”