One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.
Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.
All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear...
When I was a teen I dismantled a shotgun cartridge and removed the shot and paper charge (lots of tiny paper discs). I stuffed them down the thick end of a car telescopic antenna cut to about 4” with the end folded over. I threw in a couple of pieces of lead shot, tamped it down with a piece of paper, stuck the tube under a rock and set up a paper target 6” away. I was optimistic.
Then, with a friend, held a lighter under the closed end. Fortunately I was to the side. Predictably it fired out the back... it was very loud.
Possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. It could have gone wrong is so many way. The adolescent brain is a strange thing.
I'm 42 years old and spent much of my teens and early 20s going to loud rock shows, raves, etc.
I was rather stupid and always tried to get right up to the PA speakers at the front. I did not wear hearing protection. Many times I left shows with ringing for hours and that feeling like there is cotton stuffed in your ears for days. Not a handle of times - dozens of times.
By my mid 20s it appeared I had tinnitus around the 8k area, which really freaked me out and immediately caused me to change my habits. Also around this time I got into headphone audio in a big way. I got an SPL meter and made sure to never go above 85dBs for extended listening sessions.
By my mid 30s the tinnitus had dissipated considerably. Now it's effectively gone, at least that I can tell (ie. not aware if there is psychological compensation happening). My hearing is great too, right ear at 17.5 kHz, left ear at 16.9.
Wow, this gives me hope. I'm 22 and in the past two years I've gone to ~100 rock concerts, seeing a total of 270 sets. For the first 23 concerts I didn't wear any hearing protection, until I had a scary event with my hearing at a Neon Trees concert that left my hearing very distorted for three days. Then for the next 80 or so concert's I'd wear my hearing protection most–but not all–of the time.
In the past year I've had worsening tinnitus. Although now (and for the last ~30 concerts) I've worn ear plugs most of the time (and recently bought molded ear plugs), the tinnitus still gives me great anxiety when I hear it in quiet places like my bedroom at night. The permanency of it is what freaks me out the most. But your comment gives me hope that I'll one day be able to enjoy silence again.
I fully urge anyone who goes to rock and similar concerts with any frequency at all to wear hearing protection. I'm a fan of Earasers and custom-molded musicians ear plugs. Even if you don't care about your hearing now, once you do care, it'll often be too late.
I've had pretty bad tinnitus my whole life. In a perfectly quiet room it sounds deafeningly loud. I use a pink noise app in bed at night, but otherwise it doesn't really bother me. Point is, don't worry about it, your brain can adjust to anything and you'll be fine. As I understand it, tinnitus is only half physical damage anyway. The other half is neural. In my case I believe it's all neural.
At one point it got way worse for about a month, likely caused by stress. Freaked me out to the point of briefly having suicidal thoughts. Then I got used to it again.
That’s not too difficult if the area you live/work in has a good scene for your favourite genres of music. The music I listen to tends to be pretty DIY (very small gigs in front of 20-50 people), and more weeks than not I find myself at at least one concert.
I commute via plane for work so it gives me something to do that’s not sitting in the hotel watching TV or drinking too much alcohol.
I recommend an app called Songkick if you want to find local gigs you might be interested in, it scans your Spotify/last.fm and notifies you when artists you’ve listened to are playing nearby.
I live in Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK but not on the island of Great Britain. The company I work for is based in Belfast (capital of NI), and we bid for government contracts. For example, the government client that I'm currently working with is the DVSA (responsible for driving tests and roadworthiness tests), and the DVSA office I'm working out of is in Nottingham, which is a city on Great Britain, meaning I have the Irish Sea between me and the office I work in.
I fly out from Belfast to Nottingham at around 07:00 on Tuesday morning, and I fly home to Belfast around 20:00 on Thursday evening. Tuesday and Wednesday nights are spent in hotels in Nottingham.
From locking my front door behind me in Belfast to sitting down at my desk in Nottingham it takes around 3h30m. Thursdays are killers though, I don't get in my front door until at least 21:30. So depending on meetings, on Thursdays I frequently end up being on the go from 08:00 to 21:30, which isn't too much fun.
I ended up working this way basically because the company I work for bids for almost exclusively central government projects, and I can't think of any central government agencies that aren't based in England and therefore a flight away.
I first started doing this when I was at university and doing a year-long placement, at the same company I'm currently full-time for.
I was asked if I fancied flying back and forth, and as a 20-year-old, the prospect of getting flown around; staying in nice hotels; getting £5/£10/£30 for breakfast/lunch/dinner every day; and extra pay due to having to fly every week was quite attractive.
Currently 22-years-old and the constant flying got old pretty quickly, but I like where work and I like working on government projects that affect millions of UK citizens' lives.
Just a fan. I did several co-ops at west coast tech companies (San Francisco and Seattle) that gave me ample opportunities to see my favorite bands touring. I kept track of my concerts with a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XIwkqPQmxT6jZE5UMjxU...
I'm 43 years old, and in my 20s I went to a few loud rock shows. I had the same experience as you for days afterwards, but at the last one I attended without hearing protection, something funny happened in my right ear. It was like someone turned the tone control right down, and loud noises would distort so badly I couldn't make anything out.
A while later, I was watching a Scrubs episode where one of the characters ruptured an ear drum. That sound closely matched what I remembered hearing, so I've worn hearing protection to every concert since. Even had people make fun of me for it, but as soon as I say "probably ruptured an eardrum at a concert," they stop laughing.
I have tinnitus from a different cause, though. When I was very small, 5 or 6 years old, one of my mother's boyfriends would haul me around by my ears. I remember that my ear started ringing one day, and it never stopped.
I have two tones in one ear, and I think three in the other. 37 years later and it's as bad as it ever was, sadly. I have learned to just tune it out, but I can still hear it if I choose to - annoyingly, when I choose to hear it, I have to wait until I forget about it.
edit: Forgot to note, the ringing is very, very high pitched. Remember what CRT televisions would sound like when you turned them on? Higher pitched than that.
I literally cannot understand the mentality of people who'd make fun of you for wearing hearing protection at gigs. I go to a lot of gigs (like multiple times a week) and "simply trusting" that the sound engineer won't push the volume up into hearing damage territory is... naive at best.
Please folks, use protection. I like Etymotic earplugs, but to be honest i'm not even sure if they're "heavy enough", but my pain threshold is pretty low i think. In any case since i've been consistently using ear protection i've almost never had the ringing thing after concerts, which makes me rather glad.
It seems to be in the same bucket as people not wearing seat belts and making fun of you if you ask them to wear one in a car with you.
If it's not something everyone does, and if you mention you do it for safety, the reaction is often rather negative. I think people don't like the idea that they might have been doing something very unsafe this whole time.
Well if I'm passenger in a car with someone who won't wear seatbelts then my reaction will become rather negative until they put the damn things on. If we got in a car accident, I may be secure with belts, but I don't want their body parts flopping in my face either.
What? Who does that? Whenever I see someone wear earplugs I think "good for them" (and occasionally "shit I forgot to bring mine").
I saw loads of people wear them at the psy festival I was last summer (and wore them myself, too). And the music wasn't even that loud.
While I can hear the music just fine, it does, however, reduce that feeling of "sound presence" during a live show or set. The space feels "emptier" too, like, a huge crowd of people jumping to sonic vibrations (even stronger if it's in a darkened club with just a few bright white lights and smoke), it's pretty weird behaviour if you consider it. But the sound sort of blankets and normalizes this, at least, that's my feeling when that veil falls away when I put in the plugs.
I kind of wonder about the custom-mold plugs. I don't use the cheap yellow foam ones, but reusable ones about €20 I got at a hearing-aid store (asked for ones suitable for concerts/festivals), which I'm fairly pleased with.
Does the "presence" effect get better with the custom-molded ones? Because afaik they're about €300 or so. If they don't restore that "presence" compared to the €20 earplugs, but just some better quality (which is nice, but is it 300 euros nice?) I'm not sure if it's worth it. But if they do and they are also much more comfortable, it might be a nice present for myself :)
What brand are they? I wear Etymotic ER20XS earplugs (also cheap, about $20) now and don't notice any lack of "sound presence". I completely forget I'm wearing them after 20 minutes or so.
the abuse rate of stepchildren is something like an order of magnitude higher than of biological children, for whatever reason (correction: at least TWO orders of magnitude!)
"The Cinderella effect is well substantiated in crime data. Children growing up in step families are about 40 times as likely to be abused and 140 times as likely to be murdered as children growing up with both natural parents (murder still being a low probability)."
I'm really sorry you had to go through that. I was also physically abused by my bio mom up till about 9-10 years old (but she in turn was abused until she was 18, so she arguably reduced the snowball effect). All we can do is try to not repeat the same mistakes for our next generations. The problem is, I have temper issues to this day...
FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz (noise notch). You generally lose the really high frequencies (20 KHz on down) due to presbycusis, hearing loss due to aging. Even if you can still hear the really high frequencies, you could still have a noise notch around 4 KHz.
If you haven't already, go get an an audiogram. It's cheap (<$100) and will give you a baseline on how your hearing is.
> FYI, if you lose hearing from noise exposure, you'll generally lose it around 4 KHz
I used http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ to quickly profile my hearing and found significant loss around 4.0kHz. I have ridden a motorcycle most of my life and it is much worse in the ear that is on the same side as the exhaust.
I am not sure what a spectrogram looks like for a motorcycle but I would have assumed that most of the energy is in the lower end of the spectrum, given the steady cruising RPS is around 40Hz-70Hz. But, your comment seems to suggest that there is not a direct correlation between the frequency of the noise exposure and the hearing loss frequencies.
Wind noise is at least as loud as engine noise at least at highway speeds.
While I can clearly hear my (loud piped) Ducati at 120kmh (~70mph) - on my Honda VFR800 with stock piped the engine noise is completely overshadowed by wind noise.
As a hint about how loud that wind noise gets, up around 130-140kmh, if I've got my noise cancelling earbuds in, they start clipping. I've heard them do that a handful of times in non motorcycle riding instances, always in reaction to sounds loud enough that people around look around and cover their ears.
(These days I _always_ ride with earplugs or noise cancelling earbuds in. Even on my "quiet" bikes. Gotta save that hearing damage up for loud concerts... )
Do you feel "less connected" to the world when you are riding with earplugs in? Does it make it feel more dangerous you might be less aware? It makes sense to wear the plugs, but I've never heard of a street rider doing it.
Definitely does not feel less safe. Plugs don't "disconnect" you, they just take all the sound down a few notches. The exhaust noise, wind noise, and other traffic noises are all still there, just not so loud and insistent.
I'm completely convinced that they make me safer on long rides, because you arrive significantly less tired - works great on planes too, I won't fly without earplugs any more.
While trying this tone generator out, I thought I had a ridiculous notch in my hearing at 532Hz, because the perceived volume dropped to about 10-20% of the neighbouring frequencies. But then I moved my head slightly to the side, and the normal volume was restored!
Turns out that I had inadvertently replicated a classic high-school "constructive/destructive interference" demonstration. Driving the pair of speakers on my desk at that frequency put the position of my head in one of the destructive-interference "nulls" where the effective volume approaches zero.
So if anyone else is playing around with it, be sure to use headphones instead of stereo speakers!
That's correct. Even in a factory environment, where most of the noise is in the lower frequencies, you'll still end up with a noise notch at 4 KHz. It has to do with the anatomy of the ear.
I'm mid 20s and my hearing is pretty much perfectly cut off at 11 khz but is fine below. I've had tinnitus since youth and have had lots of exposure to loud music but it hasn't gotten tremendously worse overtime and doctors either wave it away or say it's from noise induced hearing loss, which seems at odds with the 4 khz thing I've heard from you and others.
Any perspective on what the deal with that would be? I haven't ever used an ototoxic medicine or anything
Interestingly, when I was about 16 I was at a friend's gig in a pub. I hadn't gone to many before and haven't been to many since, but on this particular occasion I was stood talking with friends near the stage with my left ear directly next to the speaker cabs. I wasn't aware of the activity behind me, but the opening band had come on to do a sound check, and being heavy metal, it was basically just a mechanical, metallic sound, 30 cm away from my ears at max volume.
Here is what is funny though, the wavelength at which my hearing "kazoos" is the wavelength at which my young son cries. So while he was a baby, and even sometimes now as a toddler, if he's upset and I'm holding him, it's gotta be my right shoulder, otherwise my left ear bugs. It's a strange feeling too, a mixture of pain and grinding and broken audio that really sets me on edge.
When I was doing my military service another conscript fired his rifle down into the ground as we where standing close together without any hearing protection on. Seconds later our captain orders us to put the hearing protection on and leads us down to a completely dark cellar with beds in it.
We then had to lay there for 48 hours in complete silence with noice canceling ear protection on with only breaks for toilet visits and quick supervised snacks.
Two weeks later we all took hearing tests that got compared with the tests we took when we joined the military and none of us had any permanent damage.
Not sure the complete silence helped with healing, but the science behind the decision to have us do that was that the little hairs in the ear heals faster if it’s not stimulated.
To this day I still think about not exposing myself to too much sound after I have heard some high noice, like someone dropping a metal weight in the gym.
Yes, modern soldiers wear “comtac” hearing protection with integrated microphones that pick up speech but block out the noise. So you can still communicate decent by shouting even though there is heavy fire going on around you.
My grandfather told me on his first day in the military he had to stand (without any hearing protection) next to the anti-aircraft cannons when they opened fire to “train” the ears. He did not have much hearing left when he was older...
My dad used to tell a story about when he got a hearing test as part of an employment medical fairly late in life, and the audiologist asks him "You're left handed, aren't you?" because he could see the typical signs of rifle shooting related hearing loss in his left ear. Turns out dad wasn't actually left handed, but shot a rifle at school cadets 30 years earlier left handed because he could only close his right eye independently - it was easier to just shoot left handed than to try to learn how to look through the sights with his right eye.
Pretty much. You watch any film from the WW-II era and only artillery crews wore any sort of hearing protection (cotton wads stuffed in their ears). But many of them gave up doing even that after a while.
I actually don’t think so. That would be a form of collective punishment which is strictly forbidden and the officers was really careful about not crossing that line. Was a bit chocking for me to learn that, I feel like American movies have lied to me my entire life when the military didn’t let the whole platoon do push-ups every time someone made a mistake :)
The guy who fired his weapon got a fine and was eventually kicked out though...
Do you mind sharing which country and how long ago was this? That's quite a strong risk-averse & duty-of-care-oriented response to the incident. Was this a teenage military service thing?
(I can see your username but I don't want to assume.)
When I was a conscript, my initial hearing test indicated a small hearing loss. Before i joined up I had worked as a busboy at a nightclub, where I never wore hearing protection. Us conscripts with documented hearing loss had to wear double ear protection[0] on the shooting range, and during field practice with blanks.
The test I got when I left the military shown my hearing had returned to normal. Youth might have something to do with it, but my experience mirrors yours in that silence can heal some damage.
[0] Earmuffs over earplugs. Conscripts normal hearing only had to wear earplugs.
I'm a sport shooter and on occasion I've shot rifles and shotguns without hearing protection.
The hearing loss dissipates after a day, even in normal conditions. I'm sure that it's bad for you long term, but short term your ears tend to fix themselves up pretty quick.
Oh, I just took a shotgun cartridge (the one used for hunting, but the old kind, made completely out of brass), flipped in with the primer up, and hit it with a hammer. Good thing my father stored those ones without the lead. The bang and flash made dizzy, and as I heard my father coming from backyard, I took cartridge to hide it - it was freaking hot, burned my hand as well.
I took all the powder out, wrapped it in tinfoil, and put it in the fireplace. I was impatient, and sprayed it with cooking oil spray. The instant I closed the door again, boom.
Makes me cringe to think I was only 7 or 8 years old.
Shortly after that, a retired cop saw us throwing rifle bullets down cement stairs with rocks taped to the primers, trying to set them off. He very calmly and sternly told us how dangerous that was.
It is amazing that any boys survive to adulthood. I don't think I could have kids, knowing what I got up to.
I think you have never met any eight year olds, if you think they are really that stupid that it would be a problem.
Unless you sheltered the poor kid to the point of making him a mushroom, he's more than rational enough to understand any hazard you take the time to tell him about. My daughter is 8, and I would have no worries with her encountering ammunition around the house because I would tell her how it works, which part of it causes it to explode, and how to handle it.
A kid that does stupid things has probably not had the 5 minutes spent with him, telling him the possible hazards.
Kids (and adults) also do stupid things because they know the hazards but feel like they are smart enough to overcome those hazards. Doing hazardous things that are known to be hazardous is no more likely at 8 than at 18. In fact it's less likely at 8. We get braver and do stupider things ("Hold my beer for a minute and watch this") as we get older.
Not that we couldn't get access to "ammo" at all here in Australia in the 70's, but my sources were mostly nail gun cartridges (stolen from building sites) and shotgun blanks used for the local sailing club's starting cannon. We'd also steal those explosive things rail workers put on tracks to warn of inbound trains.
One thing living in a country with somewhat stricter control on guns and ammunition (at least for us "city boys") - it meant we learned how to make our own explosives. We'd steal pretty much any sodium ad potassium nitrate the chemistry labs had for making gunpower - and there was significant "liberation" of nitric and sulfuric acid from the school chemistry labs too, and we had more or less success in producing home made gun cotton, tnt, and nitroglycerine. It eventually led to careers in chemistry for two of my high school co-conspirators from the time.
I grew up in a country with very strict gun control (Germany) and did almost the same thing that timonovici did. We used to collect blanks in the woods, thrown away by NATO troops during maneuvers. I don't remember what I was expecting, but I too remember the bang being so loud to make me dizzy - I think I wasn't sure for a few moments if I was dead or alive.
Just a few days ago I wrote a comment [1] about a boy who used to live a few kilometers from my house when we were children and lost half of his hand doing experiments in his parents basement.
I think fire and exothermic reactions in general are much too interesting for children to not find a way to experiment with them at one time or another, but parents should take care that children don't do it alone and that they do it in a safe way.
I also (partly) grew up in (what was West) Germany but I am British. My dad was an ATO but by that time he generally ran ammunition depots. From a very early age (5+), me and my brother were taught how to look for "devices" under cars and other skills that kids should not need.
Dad was called out to mop up after a young lad found an unexploded mortar shell and put it in a bench vice and whacked a nail into the firing pin. He has several more harrowing tales along those lines.
Gosh what fun old days those were. This was the era of the Cold War, at school we would have a bomb scare nearly weekly, Rheindahlen E mess was bombed, troops were shot at by quite a variety of nasty people and other fun and games. Mind you, a CSM pinched a Saracen or Saladin and tried to run down a bloke who was playing away with his wife. He drove it over the other bloke's car first. Shandy was involved.
On the bright side, I have friends from afar that I'm in touch with today - 40 odd years later.
This was not talked about much because it was a criminal offence, but growing up at that time in that area we were all the same and I could tell you a bunch of other stories like that.
Collecting the rounds was like a sport. The one with the biggest collection was the winner. Sometimes we found elements from ammunition belts too. They were rare and because of their small size and dark color much more difficult to find than the larger untarnished brass colored cartridges. One of the boys from my town had the perseverance to collect enough elements to assemble a belt that he could wear over his shoulder. He looked like John Rambo.
All of this wasn‘t a local phenomenon either. Much later I learned the story of a boy from a different area whose house was searched for pirated home computer games. Police didn‘t find any pirate copies but they found the blanks he had collected. Strict as the gun laws are he got a young offender sentence for unauthorized possession of a firearm (unerlaubter Waffenbesitz).
And this was all only about thrown away blanks from NATO maneuvers. When it comes to all the weapons that “disappeared” basically over night at the end of World War II, I know there is another trove of stories, but these are for someone from another generation to tell.
You might have heard about the BBC serial The Machine-Gunners, which tells a related story from the British perspective. It was very popular with us kids in Germany at that end of the Eighties. The opening theme Colonel Bogey March is now stuck in my head..
It’s fairly straightforward to get your children to survive if you don’t let them have access to live ammunition.. I think it just requires good parenting. I mean, I was a boy and I somehow realized that all of these things are incredibly bad ideas.
My experiment was on a .22 round, and when they say it's a rimfire type cartridge I can tell ya they're not kidding. Not sure how I survived childhood, but I grew up to be a productive & well rounded member of society. More or less
> ...but I grew up to be a productive & well rounded member of society. More or less
It's almost as though play, of the sort which could end your life, is a natural part of growing up (perhaps especially for boys). Then again, I don't really remember doing any very stupid things as an adolescent, probably due to spending more time in nature, trying not to die by falling, drowning, hypothermia, or impalement.
Sure, but what do you say to the friends and family of the ones that die? Or to the ones who end up maimed and disabled for life? "Oh, it's just natural, don't sweat it"
One summer when I was 8 or 9, I used a nail to scrape out the inside of a model rocket engine or two ("D" if I remember correctly) from my older brothers model kit into a pile on the concrete garage floor, then used a broken cord (literally a wall plug, a couple feet of cord, and two exposed ends) to ignite it by hand using the electric spark from the live leads.
After fleeing the garage in terror and slight pain (lucky not to have either electrocuted myself or burnt the detached structure down), I hung out doing nothing for a few hours and acted like nothing had happened. It was little use, though. Upon arriving home, my mother immediately know something was up. Not only was my face a little singed, I had burnt my eyebrows off.
Funnily enough, I'm fairly to heavily conservative when it comes to dangerous activity as an adult. I don't even drive all that fast usually.
My gym actually has a few machines were the weights regularly get stuck like this. I never considered this to be a danger. Thanks a lot for sharing that. I'll pay more attention to that in the future.
I frequently wear headphones as much for the attenuation of dangerously loud noises in public places (gyms, trains, etc) as for actually listening to something. Your story is terrifying.
I love leg press, it's my second favorite lift next to deadlift (with a hex bar, I'm not competitive or anything, no need to risk the back). You have to be VERY careful not to lockout. I always end at like a 140-160 degree angle, far less than a straight 180. If you lockout, you're going to have a bad time eventually.
Yeah. It's basically dead lift with the weight shifted along your mid-line instead of in front of your shins. Makes it really easy to keep good form since you're not worried about getting it over your knees. I find the grip is much more natural as well, since your hands are at your sides rather than in front of you.
It's not the exact same stuff, but for all intents and purposes if you're not planning on competing in a powerlifting event anytime soon it's close enough that you could substitute it. It's actually used quite a lot for athletes who can't afford to have a sore lower back in training practice.
Obviously off topic now, but as a youngster in the gym I used to use a similar machine that required me to lay down and push my legs. I worked my way up to max weights on that machine (very quickly). One day I pushed my legs out and heard this terrible crunch come from my lower spine, was barely able to hobble back home. It was near enough back to normal after 2 days or so, but scared the hell out of me.
For me it goes to show that humans are more fragile than we often like to think.
That happened to me too, don't think I got any permanent damage but that sound is super loud. Still a bit scared of that machine for no other reason than the sound.
I've heard this noise, but then much less loud, and the fact that I remember it tells enough. I just let the weight lose for the last 5cm or so, and that was enough for me not to do this again. I wasn't close with my ears, so no problem.
I'm sorry for your loss and I hope you can find a way to handle it.
I totally know what you mean by "static". Have had that issue in my left ear for decades. Not really even sure what caused it originally. Iirc I get the static at realty high decibels of some kind of frequency.
I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I get sort of the same thing in my left ear, specifically with very loud deep bass. I've always thought of it more as a rattle.
I saw someone do maintenance on a pile-driver while it was working right next to where the pile-driver hit.
It must have been really effective ear protection, but they didn't look so big. And never mind the sound, the whole head / body is going to be rattled by the vibrations. You wonder ...
[edit]
I looked up the data. 190db peak for this type (H steel piles)
I don't have any data but I think it's fair to assume that ANYTHING in front of the ear which reduces sound coming in will help on the protection front. It won't be a panacea, however.
The weights looked like these: http://www.presentationzen.com/.a/6a00d83451b64669e201156eb4...
One extra weight slab was "stuck" to the group that was supposed to get lifted. It was stuck because the weights at the gym were grimy from many years of use without being cleaned. The extra slab, when it reached the top, finally detached and slid down maybe 20-30 inches, and made a sound that everyone in the gym heard, but right next to my ear. A few people even made angry faces at me for being a noisy lifter.
Ever since then, to this day, I have had tinnitus in that ear, and many sounds come in like "static", for lack of a better explanation.
All I can say is be careful with those weights if they get sticky, and if they are near your ear...