It's been almost 7 months since the tinnitus again. Is it permanent at this point? :(
I got tinnitus nearly 7 months ago after getting an ear infection. I quickly went to an ENT and got prescribed antibiotics which helped with the constant fullness but it didn't help much with the tinnitus. This was the first ear infection I've ever gotten, by the way. At the time I only actually had tinnitus in one ear but in December the other ear started ringing (even though that ear never had an infection and never had any issues). The tinnitus sound changed a lot the first few months. The first few months there were actually two distinct sounds. Like a hard EEEE sound and a static kind of sound. The static sound eventually went away but the hard sound never did.
The tinnitus kept persisting until the middle of February when out of nowhere it just... stopped. For about 3-4 weeks the tinnitus was gone. I honestly thought it was over, but I was wrong. :/ Since March it came back and it's been persistent again. Most days it isn't too bad and I can mostly drown it out with music or something but it's always there. Sometimes it will actually nearly disappear randomly for an hour at a time but this is rarely. And then here's times it will spike to where it was in November/December when it was the worst it had been. For some reason the "spikes" almost always are at night and they're unbearable. Tonight is one of those spikes.
I've been to two different ENTs and never are helpful. The first one I went to told me that since my infection is now gone and my tympanometry results are mostly within normal levels that there was nothing else they could do and told me the next step was to get an MRI. I didn't go through with the MRI because eventually it got better a few weeks later in February. I went to a second ENT because I wanted another opinion. This ENT was confident that it was allergies but I've taken flonase and azalestine before and they don't really seem to do anything for me.
It's been 7 months... Is this likely permanent now? Is it possible that I have really bad lingering inflammation from when I had an ear infection? Should I be asking an ENT for prednisone? Is it possible that I've developed some kind of allergy and just need to figure out how to treat it properly? Can anyone here help explain why I had a whole month where it seemingly went away? :/ I'm so confused and don't know what to do because the ENTs I've been to aren't very helpful at all.
Edit: Something I forgot to mention is that I've taken 3 hearing tests after the ear infection was resolved and all of them came back 100% with no issues found.