Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ear. Please.

I am having surgery on my right ear in May.

This isn’t the first time my ear has gone under the knife. When I was eight years old, doctors at a Catholic hospital took some skin from the back of my pinna and used it to patch up a large hole in my eardrum. I spent two nights in the hospital, missed a week of school, and had an enormous bandage on the side of my head for several days. It’s also when I was gifted the board game Push Over – which I still have and play with my kids on occasion. 

I also had a few surgeries on the ear prior to my second birthday, but I don’t remember any details about them. You’d have to ask my mom, if you are interested.

I was born with a hole in each eardrum. When I was very young, my parents annually took me to an ENT specialist to check my hearing and see how the holes were doing. There was a constant concern that the ears would get infected and cause hearing loss. My mom was very diligent about ensuring I didn’t get water in my ears, as this could lead to bacteria spreading nasty stuff in my eardrums and cause deafness. I was never enrolled in swim lessons, and told to not put my head underwater when we were at lakes and pools. To this day, I don’t really know how to swim. Which is sort of weird for a lifelong resident of the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

By the time I was six, the hole in my left eardrum had completely closed and my ear was pronounced “normal.” The one on the right – which had always had the larger hole – wasn’t getting any smaller, and by the time of my eighth birthday, doctors decided they would need to patch it up.

So they did.

Ever since then – actually, even before then – I’ve noticed a slight difference in audio quality from my two ears. My right ear frequently hurt; airplane rides hurt so bad I cried. And there were often hard scabs inside the canal. I had a hearing test when I was 20, but the difference was so minor I was essentially told to just live with it. Still, my right ear was weird. I had pain in there whenever I had a cold or flu. When blowing my nose, the ear squeals and emits air. And when I do go under water, I can’t go below about 3 feet, or my ear hurts like someone is stabbing me in the head. Oh – and when I do get water in that ear, it affects my hearing for days.

As I’ve aged, I’ve noticed more differences in the audio input between the ears. Some people are particularly hard to hear, including my teenaged son. I yell at him to talk louder and more clearly, but I feel bad yelling at him when the issue might be on my end (well, I don’t feel that bad). Also, I find the acoustics in some places are terrible. And if there are competing sounds, I get quite lost. For example, the noise of a car engine already makes it harder to have a conversation with others in a car, and if the radio is on, well, then just forget it. I’m useless.

I had another hearing test last fall. It showed a more significant difference in the performance of my ears than I’d expected. I was also pleased to discover I no longer had 100% hearing in my left ear, either.

Earlier this month, I visited the audiologists at the U of M, and they requested an additional test, which showed more hearing loss in just the six months since the last test. And they took these photos:

Here’s my left ear:

Notice the beautiful, taut membrane over my eardrum. Look at the nourishing blood flowing to all its parts. It’s a work of art.

Now here’s my right ear:

Good lord! This tunnel of horror is so disgusting, I can barely look at it. I have a sudden, visceral reaction to body horror, so the fact that this cave of abhorrence is in my skull causes me to shudder with disdain. The audiologist, and her assistant, both tried scraping that white, dried crust off the rim (Jesus Christ, that hurt!), and informed me that the flap the Catholics crafted  when I was eight had since ruptured and fallen into the canal.

So, I had to decide if I wanted a hearing aid or surgery. Of course, the hearing aid sounds better to me (pun intended), but the audiologist noted that I’d probably need to switch it out yearly as my hearing deteriorated. The benefit to a surgery, meanwhile, is that it would restore my right ear’s capabilities to better than 99% (instead of <90% like it is now), making it on par with my left ear.

I opted for the surgery – even though I’m not entirely sure I wanna hear all this crap all the time.