November 1–21, 2005 — Paying per pill

Towards the end of November, I ended up with a cold that wouldn’t go away, and an ear infection to accompany it.

The ear infection, I learned, was bacterial, and the cold, viral. So I was put on antibiotics for the former and nothing for the latter. But they gave me the wrong prescription the first time around and too weak a prescription when fixing the first mistake, so around week three, little had changed.

(An argument could be made about the effects of working seven days a week without end, but I am not open to it.)

On my third trip to the walk-in clinic near work, they finally referred me to a specialist. On my first appointment there, he expressed surprise (in a subtle way that seemed to avoid assigning blame) at what I’d been prescribed, and gave me free samples of a much stronger form of antibiotic drops.

And then he looked in my ear.

He seemed a bit stunned at how long I’d had a tube perforating my left eardrum. I said I supposed I should have gone for a check-up at age 18 as the surgeon who put it there had suggested, but 18 is a busy time in anyone’s life, and it’s easy to see how these things are overlooked.

Then he suggested he remove it.

Immediately.

With a terrifying pair of blackened, archaic pliers several inches long.

“What’s holding it in my ear, exactly?” I asked.

“I can’t say for sure. It’s likely either tapered or flanged.”

“Ah. Flanged. Right. And… how will this feel, exactly?”

“It shouldn’t hurt too much.”

“Ah.”

And with no further warning, there were pliers in my ears.

He struggled a fair bit, and I winced about as much. Apparently the tube in my ear is in an awkward spot. Judging by where he was poking at it, I’d describe it as being towards my spine, in the back, bottom corner of my eardrum. Should I ever find myself performing a myringotomy, I will make a conscious effort to avoid that particular area when choosing an incision site.

And then he gave up.

“I don’t have the tools I need here. You’ll have to come to my other clinic.”

I sighed in relief and spent the next two weeks dreading giving him the chance to pull harder, though hopefully with better tools.

Two weeks later, the pliers looked uncomfortably similar, though there was now a black metal tube with a tapered outer edge that he jammed in my ear preceding the pliers.

The chair he sat me in had nothing in the way of head or neck support, and he had no advice as to how I should keep myself from twitching my head away each time he missed the tube and poked my eardrum with his pliers. We each became openly frustrated by this back-and-forth, with me eventually holding the right side of my head and pushing gently in the opposite direction of my plier-induced jerks.

And then I heard something. It was a confusing noise, like rubber snapping back and then rubbing against skin, but amplified into abstraction.

Relieved and still disoriented by the throbbing inside my head, I remembered to ask him if I could see it before he threw it away. It was blue, with two flanges on opposite sides. I was glad finally to know what it looked like, and to have it outside of my head.