Where do I begin? For all the people here who have PCS due to accidents, I can not say the same. I had a total psychological breakdown a couple months ago and started punching myself in the head in the right temporal lobe. The police came and I was put in a psychiatric hospital and a few days later the symptoms began. I was trapped, had no freedom, and none of the so-called medical staff even offered to examine me for concussion, despite my problems being on file.

Since that time in March, things have gotten worse. I am currently suffering from the following:

- Tinnitus (one ear)
- Hearing loss (one ear)
- Headaches
- Insomnia - made worse by caffeine or exercise, even much earlier in the day
- Occasional fatigue
- Vivid dreams and nightmares
- Concentration problems
- Some difficulty finding the right words to describe my thoughts
- Bouts of uncontrollable crying (may be PCS, may be my reaction to the situation)
- Feelings of unreality at times

Granted, many of these symptoms are not as severe as others here describe. It has now been 7 weeks since symptoms began and things seem to be slowly getting worse in some ways. Each day I lose a little bit more hope.

The most disturbing problems for me are the tinnitus and hearing loss. The tinnitus is not nearly as bad on average as when it first occurred, but the hearing loss is even more frightening to me, and it is noticeable, although not dramatic. There are definite dips in hearing sensitivity at many different frequencies on one side, and I have my official audiology exam scheduled tomorrow. I am devastated just thinking about it.

I am wondering what the odds are that my hearing comes back. I took a 6 day course of prednisone a month ago and the tinnitus was greatly reduced and the hearing between my ears has equalized. But as soon as the course was over the problems came back. I am going to ask to be put through another course tomorrow, but I don't know if the ENT will even bother to let me try.

I am terrified that the dose and duration of the prednisone treatment wasn't high/long enough and that in the last month I have missed the window of opportunity to save my hearing. To repeat, it did seem to just come back in 1-2 days before, but I am afraid that too many brain cells have died off since then.

Additionally, when I smoke weed to relax, I can't relax anymore as I have increased anxiety in general compared to before, mainly about my concussion symptoms. But worse is that it now amplifies the ringing in my one ear to the point where I no longer enjoy weed. I honestly think there is permanent damage to this part of my brain and my life will never be the same. Added to this, as advised, I can not drink any alcohol. So I have no real outlets of any sort right now. Even hard exercise is out of the question as it actually makes it harder to sleep, and if I have caffeine one day I wind up depressed and crying the next as a compensatory response. And I am talking normal amounts of caffeine.

I am looking for support and reassurance of any kind that these symptoms will improve with time, especially the two emphasized above. I am disturbed by the others, but they are more manageable. Hemp oil helps me sleep and the headaches have actually improved somewhat over the past week, but they barely respond to pain killers and sometimes are made worse by them. It is funny how one symptom will improve and another will emerge anew.

Anyway, as many of you have written on here, post-concussion syndrome has been the single worst experience of my entire life. It has devastated for now my hopes for a normal life in the future. I wish I could go back in time and stop myself. I feel so ashamed and embarrassed that I did this to myself, but life has hit me so hard in the past few years in various ways that I eventually just snapped. I am afraid to tell many of my closest friends what happened, and repeatedly explaining yourself to doctors is humiliating at best.

Now things are much worse than before this happened, and I break down crying several days a week. I do not have a lot of support where I live either, and the people I have around me do not fully understand what I'm going through or what it is like. They just say crap like "hopefully it will go away." But since I am not full of any hope, these are just empty words to me.