I have gained a new understanding about ears in the past two weeks. I’ve heard all my life not to use Q-tips® in my ears, but I reasoned that I was capable of being very careful and wouldn’t puncture my eardrum.
Recently I tried to clean my ear and I could tell there was something peculiar about my right ear. It was obvious when I put the Q-tip® in my ear that there was something in my ear canal that wasn’t coming out. I tried washing it out but nothing changed. Eventually I made an appointment with an ear doctor I had been to a few years earlier.
When I told her all the things I’d been doing to take care of my ears she let me know I had been doing everything wrong. She said that ear wax was formed in the part of the ear canal closest to the opening and not further back near the eardrum. When I used the Q-tips® to remove the wax I risked pushing it further back into my ear. She also said that ears were designed to shed the water out of them and we shouldn’t be putting water in them.
I recall a teacher-friend once telling me he had lost most of his hearing and that it was directly caused by cleaning his ears with Q-tips®. I thought I was careful enough not to damage my eardrum, but what I just learned was that careful had nothing to do with it. There is no way to prevent pushing wax further into your ear with a Q-tip®.
I have been soaking my ear twice a day for a week and a half trying to soften up the ear wax with Debrox®. At the end of week one, my doctor was able to remove only a portion of the wax. The rest was still too hard and painful to remove, so I’m now on my second week of Debrox® and hope it will come clean by Wednesday.
This morning brought a new surprise. Several months ago I lay in bed and thought I felt a bug crawl in my ear. I put alcohol in the ear to be sure I had killed the bug. I also attempted to use water to flush out the bug, never certain if there had really been a bug in my ear or not. When I drained the Debrox® from my ear this morning, out came the bug. I suspect I should have used olive oil to remove it in the first place instead of killing it with alcohol.
What’s the take-away from all of this?
- Never clean your ears with Q-tips®
- Don’t put water in your ears
- Use olive oil to remove a bug
I hope that in sharing this I can prevent someone else from making these mistakes with their ears or their children’s ears.
I too, had a ‘black fly’ in my ear, when I was mowing the yard one spring. The trouble with this critter, is that they BITE and he was gnawing his way ‘in”. I could hear the buzzing and feel the biting and all I could think to do was the ER, and have it removed. I was going Crazy! Slapping my head, and grinding my finger to close off the canal. I think I finally killed it before the expensive ER trip, but I couldn’t take the LOUD activity in my ear any longer. The black fly didn’t fly away, but my $$$ sure did. lesson learned… cotton in my ears when I mow.
Ouch! At least this bug wasn’t biting me. It was just crawling around and driving me nuts.