An embarrasing encounter at the Doctors office

Not for squeamish readers....

And you get to poll if I should go back!

I do a lot of free diving and swimming. With spending so much time in the water I often get ear ache when water gets trapped inside my ear canal.

Surfers will be familiar with this discomfort. Its so unsettling as, apart from the ear ache, you feel off balance as well.

Ear drops don’t do the trick and the best and easiest solution is, if I make an appointment with an ENT specialist and he quickly uses a special vacuum gadget which sucks out whatever is causing the blockage. The whole process takes just a minute for both ears and the relief is immediate.

With my trip to Oman, spending a couple of hours a day in the water, it came as no surprise when my ears played up again. When I did get back all the ENT’s were fully booked for the next 2 weeks and I eventually found a chap that could see me almost immediately. I grabbed the appointment but, by that stage, whatever had caused the blockage had shifted or worked its way out, giving me blessed relief.

I thought I’d better just go anyway, just incase whatever was causing the pain was still lurking in the ear canal.

What struck me first as I entered into the practise was that all the equipment must of been brand new - 40 years ago - when he first opened his practise. The second thing to strike me was that this Doc had done some seriously hard living in his day. He seemed to enjoy a drink and a smoke and had a deep dark tan that one gets by spending dedicated time in the sun, layering tan line on top of tan line.

His bored indifference changed to excitable when he peered into my ear canal with his magnified torch. He reached for his tools with a shaky hand and instead the high tech vacuum (which didn’t seem to be in sight) he gave me a plastic cup that was attached to a bungee chord and told me to hold it beneath my ear. He then proceeded to squirt warm water into my ear to dislodge whatever was blocking the canal. This struck me as a little counter intuitive as water was the one thing that caused the discomfort to begin with. Anyway, it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant sensation and when he felt he was done I made the mistake of glancing into the cup I was holding. Being a late afternoon appointment, the cup was filled with gunk from whoever proceeded me that day and there were pea sized blobs of hardened wax rolling around the bottom. Some wax blobs seemed to be so old that the edges were a darkened brown. None were uniform in size and I wondered if these, pea-sized balls, could really come out of a small ear canal or did the ear wax from many ears meet at the bottom of the cup and with a swirling motion combine to form these clods? I felt too embarrassed to to ask or even to really want to know the real answer. But, maybe, the good Doctor was collecting enough ear wax to make a candle…

Unperturbed he cheerfully wished me well as well as a desire that I come back in 6 months time for another check up and clean.

Later that evening the last of the water drained from my ears and they eventually made a satisfying ‘pop’ and opened.

The good old Doctor had done a great job after all.

So lets do a fun reader poll on what you think I should do:

I’m curious to see what you think.

See you next week.