Deaf, Dolorous and Dripping

So, I’d gotten myself talked into a cure or something I wasn’t necessarily ailed by.  I went to the Doc today to get a recalcitrant sinus infection annihilated.  She did my vitals and looked in my ear and said, “oh dear.  You’ve a rather massive ball of wax up in there.”  “Do I?”  That was news to me.   I tried to imagine it, this pernicious brown blob like a terrible bugger I couldn’t reach.   Would I suddenly be able to hear better?  I thought I’d been hearing just fine.  She seemed convinced it was a bad thing.   “Yes. Both ears.”

“I’ll flush it out.  Take some drops and come back on Tuesday and I’ll push it out.”  I’d had this treatment done to me once before, years ago in Hong Kong.  I didn’t doubt that my ears were full of wax.  But I did wonder if it mattered at all.  I wasn’t experiencing hearing deprivation.  I wasn’t planning to swim in any time soon, in October Beijing.  But she was upbeat, and she was convincing and I suppose I liked the idea of getting rid of something that didn’t belong. 

At home, over the weekend, I dutifully filled my right and then my left ear with drops of sodium bicarbonate.  It left me deaf and in increasingly in pain but I persevered in the name of science, obediently.  We must remove the wax!  I began to get worried Monday.  What if she didn’t show up tomorrow?  I needed to travel Wednesday morning.  Would I be left like this, deaf, dolorous and dripping?

Today, I biked over to the Doc, sat in the office and waited.  She quickly and effectively flushed out both ears and disposed of the brown soup before I could have the toilet-stare satisfaction of staring at what had been removed.  And the pain, (I’d self-inflicted) stopped and my hearing suddenly returned.  I suppose I wanted her to flush them all once again just be sure.  Don’t leave any in there, if you would.  My ears remained soggy all day and I was left with a vague sense of having accomplished something irrelevant. 

Tuesday, 10/23/18