Muffled (x-post)

Haha. You're gonna love this! Today I went to the doctor (the university doc-in-a-box) b/c I was having ear discomfort. Since I'm leaving to go on vacation soon, I wanted to make sure I wasn't getting an ear infection, or swimmer's ear. As it turned out, what I needed was to have my ears irrigated because they were quite clogged, and they needed to be able to see my eardrum to make sure there was no infection further in. If you haven't had the pleasure of experiencing ear irrigation, lucky you, as it's rather unpleasant, even as an adult. (I used to get recurrent ear infections as a kid and had this done a few times, much to my dismay).

Anyway...apparently, the earplugs I wear religiously when swimming--which is often--were pushing earwax further into my ear canals and impacting it. When the doctor looked into my left ear, he exclaimed "holy cow" and said he was surprised I hadn't noticed a dramatic loss of hearing. And I said, "what"?. My whole point of wearing earplugs was to prevent ear infections by keeping water out. Little did I know it would build up to a different problem. No pun intended, really.

When I walked out of the doctor's office, it was like I suddenly had rabbit hearing. Which, of course, is quite scary, when you think about how you could experience significant hearing loss and not know it. Because, sometimes, we don't even realize what we're missing out on, right? At least now I can hear a pin drop on the carpet here at home.

Posted by bellcurves at 7:58 PM
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