Go punch yourself in the jaw. Hard. Right at the top, just before it meets the ear. I’ll wait.
Done? Good.
If you’ve never had an earache before, that’s what it feels like. A swollen, usually dry, throbbing pain right at the top of your jawbone. Hurts to think, hurts to move your mouth and hurts to be awake. I’ve experienced earaches 2-4 times a year for as long as I can remember. Every time the weather changes dramatically, and it doesn’t matter hot or cold, rainy or dry, I get earaches. If I travel and stay in a new climate for more than three days, I often get one when I get back. If I dare go swimming and stay underwater just a bit too long, I wake up the next morning with pain.
Twice now I’ve had earaches on the mornings of major surgeries, prompting the doctor to inject me with antibiotics which HOLY SHIT CURED ME INSTANTLY. Fuckin’ thing may have been a placebo, but I don’t care. All I know is that surgeons have access to special drugs that work faster than most other drugs I’ve even been prescribed. Unfortunately, surgeons don’t usually make housecalls, nor do they appreciate me asking them for an injection. Most of the time I’m prescribed antibiotics, the most popular, recent one is called a Z-pack.
Some of you are probably saying to yourself: “damn, that’s a lot of antibiotics. Won’t you A) become immune, B) develop worse infections over time and C) pretty much be harming your body with so many prescriptions.”
Well yeah, but what the hell am I supposed to do? Back when I was but a wee lad, I have tubes in my ears. Twice. Yes, I was that kid who always had to wear earplugs in the water, though I never remember me or my mom fussing about them. I just remember always wearing them, but never as an older child. So yeah, I can cut down on the amount of injections I get by avoiding going underwater in chlorinated pools, but that got much harder to do once I moved to AZ. 100+ and I can’t dunk my head? Right.
Another fear is that I may get an infection somewhere else that doesn’t respond to normal levels of antibiotics, which could cause it to linger and possibly spread, thus requiring major surgery to cut out a piece of flash. Yeah, that’s happened, too. I’ve had four total, three on the same spot, to remove pilonidal cysts (dear god don’t look it up unless you have a strong stomach, but if you want to see post-surgery pics, I have a couple) from just under my tailbone and lower on my butt. Those infections festered and deepened for almost three years before they were removed, even though I took antibiotics for ear infections at the time. Lesson here: Too many antibiotics are bad.
Treating my ear infections has become fairly simple. If it’s an inner ear infection, I just go to the doctor. Those ones make you dizzy, sap my energy and occasionally induce vertigo, all the while never getting better. Outer ear infections require me to suck it up, and I usually treat them with a bit of steroid cream and hours laying on my side with a heating pad on my ear. In both cases, I avoid loud noises, dry air (that means A/C needs to go off or be run with a humidifier) and talking.
My childhood doctor also told me to pop my ears as often as possible, in hopes that relieving pressure would help ease the pain when (he said if, but he meant when) they came back. I also use the Neti Pot sinus irrigation thing often, and I think that helped. Saline nose spray is also readily available in my car and home.
I’m sick of this. I’ve never really known the cause of all these problems, and it’s damn well time to figure it out. There’s no way I should be getting this many infections if I’m taking care of myself (oh, I also found out that kids with a lot of ear infections are more likely to have ADHD). Perhaps it’s diet related? I drank a lot of milk as a kid and that’s been known to cause problems, as have other things like gluten. Maybe this Fat Off 10 thing will help with that.
Stay in school, kids. And don’t get earaches.
