Ear infection

I came down with "swimmer's ear". Either that or my 2-q-tip a day habit had finally caught up with me. Now I had an ear infection that was getting worse by the minute. My ear canal had swollen up and was oozing yellow gunk. And I couldn't hear out of that side. I was freaking out. Was this my Meniere's disease returning, this time for good to eradicate my prized residual hearing? And what to do? My wife is a doctor but her specialty in Medical Genetics hardly prepared her for this challenge. Her diagnosis of 'dysmorphic ear syndrome' was not helpful in the least and, I must say, a little stigmatizing. Seriously, she looked in my ear and diagnosed me with 'otitis externa', an outer ear infection. Well, at first she said my ear was "gross" but I already knew that, and when pressed she gave me her professional opinion.

But diagnosis is but the first step. What to do next? I suddenly missed my ENT and audiology friends back home. They would surely take care of me. But here I was a foreigner in the US healthcare system, granted post Obama-care, but still a foreigner so I didn't count. Would I be put before one of Barack's "Death Panels" and deemed too expensive to treat? To make matters worse, my daughtner had come down with the stomach flu. Misery and darkness descended.

As I read once on a church billboard in Oak Bay, the darkest hour is only 60 minutes long. And soon, through somewhat illegal channels, I had procured some powerful narcotic agents to quell the inferno of pain in my ear. Soon the agony and disgusting discharge subsided and I was on my way to healthy hearing once more, vowing to never q-tip again.