My good ear

Rarely do I get a case of the Monday’s. It’s usually a case of the Tuesday’s for me. Today has turned out to be one of those Tuesday’s. My morning started out with the loss of hearing in my right ear. I don’t know the technical or medical details, but I don’t have Grade A ears. When I was a wee lad I had “tubes” in my ears. To date I still don’t really know why I had these tubes in my ears. Brief research lends me to believe that I had tympanostomy tubes.

I remember once losing hearing in one of my ears during my adolescence. My mom took me to our family’s general practitioner to find out why I lost my hearing. He took a large syringe with a soft plastic tube on the end, filled it with a warm water and hydrogen peroxide solution and forcefully irrigated my deaf ear. To spare you the details, chunks of orange, grease-like material spat from my ear hole. Alas! I could hear. I could hear very well too.

Now keep in mind, I’m very concious as far as hygiene is concerned. I clean my ears regularly but there’s only so far one can go spelunking with a washcloth or foreign object into the ear canal.

Every six months or so I lose hearing in one of my ears. I couldn’t “fix” my hearing loss a couple years ago so I visited the medical supply store. There I purchased a 20ml plastic syringe and have since performed my own earrigation.

This morning I woke up with total loss of hearing in my right ear. I pulled my earrigator and hydrogen peroxide from the bathroom drawer and got into the shower. I tried flushing my ear to no avail.

Not being able to hear out of one ear is extremely frustrating. My equilibrium is off and, well, I can’t hear out of one side of my head. While driving to work I completely missed my mouth while trying to take a drink of water from my 34 oz. Bubba Keg and poured a liberal amount of H20 onto my crotch. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with equilibrium. It may be due in part to Daylight Savings Time or plate tectonics.

Listening to my iPod during the commute was pointless. I had my stereo volume up to the point of rattling and all I could hear was, “Verumm arrm mmm nurrr mooom”

I’m going to go to my boss’s pharmacy later this afternoon and see if someone can dispense some sort of solution for my problem.

As you’re reading this, be glad that you have your damn hearing. I take back what I wrote previously about having to choose a sense to give up.

UPDATE: I went to the pharmacy later in the afternoon. I was sold on a few ear candles (cool name for a band). Some people think ear candling is a good thing. Others think it’s not such a good idea. Either way, I just wanted to hear again.

Wanda also gave me some herbal ear oil that is supposed to loosen up any compacted junk in the ear canal. I put a few drops of the ear oil in the ol’ ear hole immediately. I couldn’t wait much longer before I had to try out the ear candle.

The ear candle isn’t really a candle by conventional standards. I thought it would be some type of low heat candle that gently dripped candle wax into your ear and would slowly solidify and the gunk in the ear would afix to the candle wax and be pulled out when removing the melted wax. Instead, an ear candle is a gause like material, formed into a long cylinder that is dipped in wax to mantain a tube-like structure. The narrow end of the tube is placed in the ear canal, lit and the flame pipes a low heat into the ear canal and creates a gentle vacuum that is supposed to “lift” dirty little deposits that reside in the ear canal.

One of my staffers caught me ear tubin’ in the break room

The tube didn’t work. My equilibrium was non-existent and I was severely frustrated. I went back to the pharmacy and they gave me a 20ml syringe. I drove back to the office, microwaved a cup of water and earrigated the hell out of my right ear with the new syringe. After another 20 minutes of forcing hot water into my ear, I finally regained my hearing (see chunks of orange greasy material spewing above).

I hate losing my hearing as much as strangers sitting across from me when I’m eating along.