Say you go to a loud rock concert. The next day you wake up with the feeling of something stuck in your ear. Maybe a bit of hearing loss. No ringing (not tinnitus) in your ear and everything else feels normal with your sinuses.
A few days later it just clears up and everything is fine.
Is this a FORM of tinnitus (tinnitus w/o the ringing)?
Basically I am wondering what is going on in your ear when it feels like it’s full of something but it isn’t. Or it feels like your eardrum is obstructed in some way - and it just goes away.
My GUESS is that during said rock concert, a bunch of wax vibrated itself down into a clump near your ear drum and is keeping it from vibrating. But this is just a guess.
When you are around really loud noise for a while, your body adapts, and stops the little hairs in your ears from vibrating at quieter sounds, in an attempt to protect them from breaking off (once they break off, they never grow back - hearing loss is permanent.) This effect lingers for some time after the event.
In that situation you’ve over stimulated your basilar membrane. It’s similar to the numbing experience in the hands after using a push power mower to mow the lawn or using a chainsaw. The long tapered end of the membrane is sensitive to higher frequencies and is also the most easily effected by overexcitation and possibly damaged. The numbing down of higher frequency sounds leads to the cotton in the ears feeling, where low frequency perception is the only one getting through.
Doesn’t it work the other way, too? I generally go to sleep with the TV or radio on, and I notice that when I wake up during the night, the volume that was perfectly acceptable to me at midnight is blowing-out-the-eardrums loud at 4am.