My Left Ear

This past Saturday morning, I woke to discover that my left ear failed to report for duty. Anything I was able to hear with that ear sounded muffled and miles away. It was so unnerving.

You know how your ear feels with it fills with water and you can’t get it to drain, or how it feels when you’re in a plane climbing to a higher altitude? My left ear felt like that. I figured I only needed to make it pop. I’m so naive at times.

I made myself yawn, which wasn’t difficult because I had yet to drag myself out of bed and wasn’t fully awake. I opened my mouth really wide and waggled my jaw. I tugged on and wiggled my ear lobe. I poked my pinky finger inside my ear canal and wiggled it. No pop.

Aha. I remembered an ear-popping trick a pilot once showed me. I pressed my lips together tightly and pinched my nostrils shut so no air could escape, and then I blew air into my nose. Hard.

The air pressure should have been equalized on both sides of the eardrum. It wasn’t.  My eardrum should have popped right then and there. It didn’t. I should have been able to hear normally again. I couldn’t.

Uh-oh.

Panic set in. The obvious conclusion was that my body was finally falling apart. First the memory went bye-bye—it’s always the first to go—then the 20/20 vision took a hike, and now I feared I was experiencing the onset of hearing loss. Was I over the hill? Don’t answer that.

Church that evening was something of an embarrassment. I’m not all that good at reading music—I never learned how. We sat too far from the pianist and the choir for my one good ear to hear the music well enough. I was hearing in mono instead of stereo. There were two hymns we sang that I hadn’t heard before. I made sure not to sing loud, but from some of the glances Macho Guy sent my way, I’m pretty sure I sang off key. Thank Heaven that’s not a mortal sin.

The following morning, my left ear felt worse. The ear canal was beginning to swell shut. I told Macho Guy that I needed to go to the Urgent Care facility nearby to have my ear checked.

MACHO GUY: [glancing at his watch and appearing perturbed] Can you be ready to go in half an hour?

TIME OUT FOR THOSE WHO HAVE EVER ROOMED WITH ME TO DISSOLVE INTO HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER AND THEN COMPOSE THEMSELVES.

MACHO GUY: If we don’t leave by ten-thirty, I’ll have to take you there after three-thirty.

ME: [annoyed] Why can’t we leave after ten-thirty?

MACHO GUY: [impatient] So there’s enough time for you to be seen and so we can be back here no later than noon.

ME: [more annoyed] There’s no law that says we have to have lunch at noon on the dot.

MACHO GUY: [more impatient] I wasn’t thinking about lunch. The game starts at noon.

ME: [even more annoyed, thinking—sports, it always comes down to sports] What game?

MACHO GUY: [much more impatient—about to explode, actually] The game, the Spartan game! The Spartans are playing Wisconsin today at noon.

ME: [miffed that a Spartan game takes precedence over my sore ear but hiding it] Ohhh. That game. Of course.

MACHO GUY: [earnestly] It’s a very important game. The Spartans have to win to stay number one in the Big Ten and to stay in the top ten nationally.

ME: [thinking I’d get more respect if I painted myself green and white] Right, right. Tell you what, Honey. Why don’t you just drop me off at Urgent Care? I’ll call you when I’m done. If it isn’t half time, you can pick me up after the game so you won’t miss anything. I’ll hang out with all the sick and dying in the waiting room until you come for me.

MACHO GUY: [face lighting up like Lady Liberty’s torch] You’d do that? Are you sure? I’ll stay with you if you want me to. [big insincere grin]

ME: [trying not to scream because it would hurt my ear] Yeah, sure. I’ll take my iPad along and work while I wait.

I hoped Macho Guy would rediscover his humanity by the time we reached the Urgent Care facility but the cad thoughtlessly dropped me off and zoomed back to the cottage to watch the Spartan game. You would think after all these years that he could recognize sarcasm when he hears it and know I didn’t mean it when I said I didn’t mind being dropped off. Men.

As it turned out, the culprit that ultimately messed up my left ear was Macho Guy’s snoring. If snoring were an Olympic event, he’d blow away the competition and claim the gold. I have to wear earplugs every night if I hope to get any sleep.

The Urgent Care medics determined that wax build up formed a plug in my ear canal causing an ear infection. We figured out that the earplugs I use to muffle the sound of Macho Guy’s plaster-shattering snoring push the earwax farther and farther back into the ear canal. Eventually, that wax can form a plug like the one they flushed out of my left ear. They also informed me that my left ear canal has an odd shape—it takes a 45-degree turn about halfway—which exacerbates the problem. Well, of course. If anyone were to have an oddly shaped ear canal, it would have to be me.

On the upside, I can hear normally again, but there is a downside too. Treating the ear infection creates a waking nightmare for me. I must put drops in my left ear for the next seven days. During that time, I can’t put an earplug in that ear at night to muffle Macho Guy’s rafter-rattling snore, and I left my earmuffs in Michigan.

I feel a week of sleep deprivation coming on.