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 calm her mind.
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 tinnitus.
What is pulsatile tinnitus?
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 Clinic in Chicago.
Pulsatile tinnitus, which makes up about 15% of cases, is typically a “whoosh-whoosh sound” with patients describing it as hearing their heartbeat in their ear, he adds. The rhythmic pulsing noise is happening inside their body and is related to the vascular system, according to the clinic.
It can be severely life-disrupting.
“I’ve had at least one patient who was so distraught by this that she was (having) suicidal thoughts,” Shaibani tells TODAY.com.
“People have trouble doing their jobs because they say the noise is so loud that it’s hard to have a telephone conversation.”
Pulsatile tinnitus can sometimes be the symptom of a dangerous condition — a short circuit between arteries and veins close to the base of the skull, known as an arteriovenous fistula, which can lead to stroke or hemorrhage, Shaibani says.
But in Pulciani’s case, the cause was more benign. She had a narrowing of one of the main veins that take blood out of the brain, likely caused by idiopathic intracranial hypertension or high pressure in the head, Shaibani says.
Surgery to stop the whooshing noise
A narrowed vein creates noise in the same way pursed lips create a whistling sound, Shaibani notes. And because blood flows rhythmically, people with this condition hear a whooshing sound in sync with their heartbeat.
Pulciani was able to quiet the noise when she pressed on her jugular vein because that stopped the blood flow in the vein, thus stopping the sound.
That’s a good first test when doctors are trying to figure out whether a person has pulsatile tinnitus, Shaibani says.
In November 2023, Shaibani placed a stent in the narrowed vein in Pulciani’s brain to open the blood vessel and take away the noise. There was no skull opening involved during the three-hour surgery — the stent was delivered through a vein in her groin, then guided with a long flexible tube through her body to the vein in her head.
The stent also treated the thinning of the bone around her vein, a secondary cause of the noise, by creating a supportive wall for the blood vessel, Shaibani says.
The results were immediate.
“Once I fully woke up … it was literally the most rewarding feeling after 13 months to not hear this noise,” recalls Pulciani, who is a supervisor for a Northwestern Medicine spine clinic.
“I told Dr. Shaibani that I feel like he gave me my life back.”
More than six months after the surgery, Pulciani says she feels great. She urges people who have the same symptoms to be aware of the difference between regular tinnitus and pulsatile tinnitus. When she was still hearing the noise, she found answers and support in a Facebook group called the “Whooshers” for people with pulsatile tinnitus.
Shaibani says it’s common to occasionally hear a heartbeat sound, especially if you’re lying on your left side in bed against two pillows.
But if you’re hearing it every day — especially a whoosh-whoosh sound, even if it’s not necessarily continuous — it’s something to pay attention to, even if it's not that bothersome, because it can signal that dangerous arteriovenous fistula in a minority of cases.
“Many of the causes of pulsatile tinnitus are treatable, as opposed to regular tinnitus for which we don’t always have good treatment,” Shaibani says.
“Certainly, if the noise is loud enough that it’s really affecting your daily life or ability to sleep then you should definitely get it checked out.”
