Dana Pulciani first heard the mystery noise when she woke up one morning in the fall of 2022. It was totally out of the blue. She’d always been healthy and everything was fine the day before.
But suddenly, there was a constant whooshing noise in her left ear, similar to what’s heard when a pregnant woman gets an ultrasound, she says. At first, Pulciani and her primary care physician thought it was fluid in her ear. But when the noise persisted and got louder, she became concerned.
“I heard it 24/7. ..
. The noise started actually getting to the point where I truly could not sleep because it was so loud,” Pulciani, who is now 39 and lives in Warrenville, Illinois, tells TODAY.com.
“I would sleep maybe two to three hours a night for 13 months. That’s how hard it was to get peace of mind. It was pretty hard to deal with.
” Pulciani remembers thinking she was “going crazy.” She started doing yoga three times a week to try to . She noticed the whooshing sound was in tune with her heartbeat, and discovered that when she pushed on the jugular vein in her neck, the noise would stop.
In December of 2022, she finally had an explanation for what was happening: pulsatile tinnitus, a rare subset of . Regular tinnitus is when a person hears a noise — often a ringing, buzzing, whistling or high-pitched sound — that’s not actually present in their environment, says Dr. Ali Shaibani, an interventional neuroradiologist at the Northwestern Medicine Pulsatile Tinnitus Clini.
