My Ear Doesn’t Hurt

So I have this dorky problem with my left ear. Once or twice a year the middle ear fills with this nasty yellowish fluid and it causes my eardrum to retract. This results in a mild to severe hearing loss in that ear depending on how long I let it go. I walk around feeling like someone has a finger in my ear (a big hot finger), and saying “what”, “pardon” & “huh” a lot. I also have the TV up so loud that my wife and the teenager are very rude about me. Whatever – it is easily solved. I go to my E.N.T. Doctor (Chapnick at Mt. Sinai – really I recommend him; painless, courteous and fast. If I ever need a nose job, he will be my man – but I digress) and he puts a tube through my ear drum, the fluid leaks out, the eardrum can loosen up and I can hear. After 6 months or so the tube falls out, or gets plugged or whatever and he has to fix it up. Well last week the phantom finger came back, “pardon” became my favourite word, and little nuclear explosions of noise and pain were going off in my middle ear. I dropped in on good old Chappy this morning, and within 5 minutes he had diagnosed a plugged tube, pulled it out and sent me on my way. It used to be way more time consuming and painful with my old E.N.T., mostly because she used a grommet instead of a tube which meant that sometimes it attached itself to my eardrum – and trust me that hurts like a mother when they pull it loose, that and she often used me as a teaching case - and believe me, you don’t want a resident poking multiple holes in your eardrum with a teeny tiny scalpel. I will be fine now until the hole closes up and the fluid returns. Hopefully I will make it through the summer. It puts the kibosh on swimming when you have a hole in your eardrum. Three things you should know about eardrums. When they put in or take out a tube it is REALLY FREAKIN LOUD! When you forget that you have the tube in and go swimming in the ocean it REALLY FREAKIN STINGS! And when they are sucking the freezing off your eardrum with a little suction tool, it makes your middle ear change temperature and the ROOM REALLY SPINS! Thought you might want to know.