Seeing as this thread has been raised from the dead, and certainly pops up when I search for more info on my own recent problem - I figure I'll add my voice to the noise. I first got tinnitus from a water skiing session in mid-winter (~5C air temp, 5C water temp) with no hood. Got back in to shore and noticed it. It got progressively worse for a few years then leveled off. Of course I had the usual student bouts of noise from music venues, but since I rarely went to such venues (couple of times a year, for 4 years) I'm not sure it's relevant.
Over the course of the next 8 years or so I suffered with varying degrees of it, and partial hearing loss (only high frequency loss, about 12KHz and above but this is never reflected in medical tests as they stop at 8KHz). This manifested in things like asymmetric hearing of rain/shower noise - quite off-putting. Simultaneously I was using otrivine and other nasal sprays to deal with chronic rhinitis issues (and then became dependent on it). In the last 18 months I saw an ENT specialist and he pulled me of the otrivine and put me on steroidal sprays and my tinnitus and hearing loss reduced by 90%, confirmed by auditory tests showing I actually have hearing that is significantly better than my age group across the board. He blamed my hearing loss on a swelling of my Eustachian tubes and said there was no underlying issue, just one of those things.
Then I went diving last month, for the first time in 2 years. 12C water temp, 15C air temp, 20m dive, no problems equalising, nice controlled dives with no buoyancy issues. Tinnitus back, loud enough to hear over people talking at times, but comes and goes in intensity and is now also responding to coffee intake which it never did.
