The Rupture

Some of you knew that Wendy has been quite sick with a violent cough.  She got it from Oliver who coughed so hard he would throw up and get bloody noses from his coughing fits.  While I escaped it, Wendy got the brunt of it and and on Friday night around 3:00 a.m. I went downstairs to see if she was okay.  Wendy was both coughing and throwing up.  She was okay and we were sitting downstairs when she went to head back upstairs and go to bed.  I was about to join her when I said that I wasn’t feeling okay and would be up in a minute.  I fell asleep on the sofa only to awake with an amazing amount of pressure in my ear.  The pillow I had grabbed was covered with blood and it was coming from my ear.

I went to the emergency clinic and the doctor prescribed me a lot of penicillin and some anti-biotic ear drops as well.  Over three days it helped but the reality was that the sudden ear infection had ruptured my ear drum and I couldn’t hear out of it at all.  All I hear is a kind of sound you hear when your ears are plugged on a flight and very little else.  Apparently it’s too soon to tell if my hearing is gone or if it will return over a couple of months.   The good news is that the fluid, mucus, and blood that were literally flowing out of my left ear stopped and the infection is done.  I still have about 4 days left of antibiotics that make me sick whenever I take them but believe me I’ll finish them off, I don’t want a return of this thing.

The pain of having your ear drum ruptured is not pleasant.  It hurts a lot, causes additional headaches and has moved from from Advil to Tylenol with codeine.  I also am using ear drops which have a topical pain killer and as I learned today, while I look like a dork, I am also keeping a cotton ball in my left ear.  It helps filter out the static a bit and let’s me hear more clearly.  Losing your hearing in an ear is disorientating (sounds that are coming from the left are only being heard from my right ear which makes me think the sound came from the right) and it’s hard to be out and about in a place like a mall or as I found out last night at Alexander’s, I just can’t pick out the signal versus the noise.

A lot of people have asked me if I am freaked out if the hearing loss is permanent and I  really am not.  It’s not my preferred choice but people do cope with this and do live regular lives. Is it my preferred outcome?  Obviously not but it’s an outcome that people live with.   I expect my hearing to make a slow return over the next couple of weeks but until then I will appreciate the (perceived) quiet around me.  That and maybe develop an addiction to codeine, we’ll see how it goes.