Daniel Coburn

The other day I decided I would get my hearing checked. For a couple of reasons. First, I have had a horrible ringing in my ears for many many years. Second, my wife will hear things and look at me and say “Can’t you hear that?” The going joke with her is she’ll look at me now and just say “of course not it’s that one pitch”. Third, sometimes I think I miss things. And finally going along with #2 my wife keeps telling me I’m def.

So I get the test done and sure enough I do have hearing loss. They said it’s nothing to really worry about, I’m not def, but I do have a lose in the higher ranges. Which isn’t surprising since the high pitch that is in my ears all the time is in the higher range. So go figure…. They also said, “You are a candidate for a hearing aid, but I wouldn’t strongly recommend it”. I took that as you could hear better, but you’re not hearing that bad right now to worry, so come back later.

So I’ll wait.

More Ears. That night my daughter had a bad ear ache and we put cotton in it etc. etc. and when we took it out later it looked like it had blood on it. So we went into lets get her checked ASAP mode. My in-laws came over quickly so my wife and I could both go with Gena to the Doctor. We get to an urgent care about 8:00 PM and she gets in pretty quick. The Dr. looks in her ears and says they need to be flushed.

If you have EVER had your ears flushed you know it sucks, feels weird etc. Now imagine your ear already hurts. So my sweet daughter gets the drops to loosen the junk in her ear and sits there for a few minutes. A nurse comes in and proceeds to flush her ear. A LOT of stuff comes out including a really big piece of wax. At this point my daughter is upset, and I mean irately upset. And the nurse says there’s more. She tries again and my daughters had enough of it. I ask to just put more drops in and the nurse finally complied. I figured it’ll loosen what’s in there up. We convince my daughter and talk her up to let the nurse do it again, but that was not going to happen any time soon, she wouldn’t even let them look in her ear. Finally with her on my lap hugging me, a different nurse looked in her ear and said she could see the ear drum, so the Dr. could look again.

Her ear is infected and the drum is bulging. The Dr. said he wouldn’t be surprised if the ear drum didn’t rupture. So we internally freak out as parents until the Dr. said it would actually probably make her feel better and he then explained that it would heal. So we felt relieved. My daughter went home and we let her sleep in our bed last night. Lucky for me, it was just her and I, and she woke up several times just screaming, “Get Away From Me, Get outta here”. She was still asleep yelling at the Dr. and Nurses. Today she also threw up, but we aren’t sure why. But she’s my girl and I’m getting ready to go spoil her.

She’ll recover, she always does, but once again she’s really learning to hate Doctors. I hope she gets over that and later realizes how beneficial they are, vs. how bad.