Today is my first half-day back at work since Friday.
My punctured ear drum turned into “every bacteria on the planet invade 3choBoomer’s ear canal and have a good ol’ time”.
This quickly escalated from some funky yellow stuff oozing out of my ear on Thursday, to 9/10 on the pain scale by Sunday night.
I had Otitis Externa (an external ear infection) and the swelling that resulted from that had closed off my ear canal setting up a great place for the infection to start exerting pressure on the entire right side of my head.
Thankfully DrWife had a few Darvocet laying around from her postpartum recovery and I was able to take one of those every 4 or so hours so I could sleep. And sleep I did until about 3pm Tuesday morning. All this time I was waiting for an ENT appointment at UAB. Apparently they are really busy and couldn’t work me so I took things into my own hands an got an appointment at the ENT’s office that fixed my broken nose back in highschool (apparently some dude didn’t handle it too well that I took his girlfriend)…
Anyway, my visit to the ENT proved fruitful. He basically pried my ear canal open with a tiny speculum like device and sucked all of the goo from my ear (what a great sucking sound that was too). Then he proceeded to stick a wick down into my ear the size of a telephone pole so that the medicine could wick itself down there past the swelling.
The resulting pain from the ear probing sent me close to passing out (the fact that I did not eat breakfast that morning didn’t help things much). The doc and the nurse saw my vasovagoal reaction and quickly reclined my seat and kept me under observation for about an hour. Since then I have only taken one pain pill and I’m feeling much better.
The doc’s got me on a cocktail of antibiotics to fight off this bug that in his words “eats antibiotics like Ketek and Amoxicillin for breakfast”. I got two shots yesterday (one antibiotic, and one steroid) more of the same today, and more of the same tomorrow. I’m also taking two different antibiotics by mouth daily, and I’ve got two different antibiotic ear drops that I use in my ear a total of 6x per day.
He’s taking this infection pretty seriously I’d say. Big shout-out to Dr. Sciacca (pronounced ShockA) and Alabama ENT Associates for their service and the professional courtesy they extended to me since there was a fubar in my new medical insurance (which has caused my wife and my self to lay out at least $400 on prescriptions and doctors bills over the last week).
Oh and if you’re up for a cheap good show tonight The Uglistick will be playing a low-dough show at WorkPlay tonight for only $5!