There is a painful commercial running on TV these days that shows an illustration of a guy cleaning out his ears with a cotton swab. But because the commercial isn’t selling Q-tips, you can imagine what happens next.
The swab pierces the eardrum! Lightning bolts of pain stab inward from every direction! A scream of panic tells you that the whole thing was a bad idea from the start!
But then the mood brightens because the commercial tells you that a Q-tip isn’t your only option when it comes to ear-canal grooming.
Because now there’s the Ear Sucker, or whatever it is that they call it.
It looks like a little Buck Rogers ray gun, but it’s really a tiny, battery-operated vacuum. Or maybe it really is a ray gun that looks like a tiny vacuum. I don’t know. All I know is that smiling women use it on their smiling children, and sometimes the smiling children use it all by themselves.
Still, this little Ear Sucker doohickey looks a bit dangerous to me.
I mean, what if you jammed it in far enough to create a perfect seal around the nozzle and then pulled the trigger? You’d suck your brains right out your ear hole, wouldn’t you?
There’s an urban legend about a lady who sat on an airline toilet and flushed it before she stood up. Because her buttocks were rather voluminous, her flesh had created a perfect seal with the toilet seat, and when the toilet flushed with a million pounds of pressure behind it…. Well, I think you know what happened next. It’s not the kind of weight-loss program that any responsible airline would want to advertise.
The urban legend about the airplane toilet probably isn’t true, but once you get an image like that into your head, it’s hard to get it out.
And so, no Ear Sucker for me. I’ll find other ways to keep my ear holes squeaky clean.
Which brings us to how I ended up in the Emergency Room on New Year’s Eve.
I have never been a Q-tip user. My preferred method of ear-cleaning is with a little rubber syringe. I fill it with warm water while showering, and when I squirt it into my ear canal, all manner of goop and gunk come flowing out.
But on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 23, I might have been feeling a bit ramped-up from all those Christmas cookies I had been gorging on for the past week or so.
Because this time, when I squeezed the bulb, I ruptured my eardrum.
There are no words to express what it feels like to blow out your eardrum, but the Ear Sucker commercial does a pretty good job of showing it. My eyes squeezed shut with pain, so I didn’t see all those little lightning bolts that I’m sure were stabbing in from every angle in the shower stall. They got the scream of panic just about right.
But what the Ear Sucker commercial didn’t show when an eardrum pops is the vertigo that sends the world spinning, knocking you to your hands and knees, leaving you thinking, “The only way this could possibly be worse is if I were showering in a men’s prison right now.”
Fortunately, the moment passed — though not the high-pitched ringing in my right ear, which was the only sound that registered.
I did what any sensible person with a blown-out eardrum would do. I went to Google for advice.
It turns out that ruptured eardrums are a fairly common injury and nothing to get too excited about. They often heal by themselves, as long as infection can be avoided.
And so, bolstered by the certainty that the internet never lies, I did nothing.
That is, until the infection set in. After a week, by the wee morning hours of New Year’s Eve, the lightning bolts were a constant companion. Not to mention a steady ooze of something that resembled weak orange juice. It turns out that shower-stall water blasted past your eardrum all the way to your cerebrum isn’t completely sterile. Who knew?
And so, at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, I drove myself to the emergency room.
As the ER doctor plunged an industrial-strength Ear Sucker into my ear hole, he asked how I managed to offend an eardrum that had probably been minding its own business. I told him about the little rubber syringe.
“Bad idea,” he said.
“Really?” I snapped. “Do a lot of patients show up in the ER because they had a good idea?” Pain had rendered me peevish, but he overlooked my sarcasm. After all, he was a professional, and it was still early on New Year’s Eve. Stupidity would deliver a lot bigger idiots to him by this time on New Year’s Day.
He sent me to a specialist, whose plaques on the wall announced that he was Dr. Roberts, Otolaryngologist, which is a Latin word that means, “You stuck what up your ear hole? Bad idea!”
And now, after a liberal dosing of antibiotics, things are getting better. The torn eardrum is healing. The only weak orange juice in my life now is on the breakfast table, not on my pillowcase.
Oh, the ear still rings, though not much worse than it did before the whole syringe incident, thanks to an ill-advised youth spent around blasting shotguns and blaring rock music—which, it turns out, was probably also a bad idea.
But the hearing is getting better, day by day. In the car, I can now turn the radio down enough that I’m no longer offending that rap music fan next to me at the stoplight.
In the end, I guess I should have listened to my mother, who used to say, “The only thing you should ever stick in your ear is your elbow.”
For the record, I tried doing that this morning, and now I wonder what that ER doctor would say if he were to ask how I wrenched my shoulder.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
