Something's busted

I have lots of things to blog about, including the holidays, cute things Boy Wonder is doing, cute things Action Hero is doing, and cute things Charming Bungalow is doing. However, the latest development is so odd and unexpected that I feel the need to share it first. Reader discretion is advised.

It began almost two weeks ago, when Boy Wonder developed a high fever and spent the next three days flattened by some sort of virus. Sure, we want kids to rest when they're sick, but it's eerie when a usually energetic four-year-old says, "I'm too tired to play. I just want to sit in your lap, please. Can we rest now?" The virus then commenced its infiltration of our entire household, felling the rest of us one by one. Dragon started coughing so hard that he couldn't sleep, and Action Hero and I got our fevers last Sunday. His didn't go away until yesterday morning, and mine visited on and off during the week, along with lots of coughing, sneezing, and general unpleasantness. We bought lots of tissues, juice, and cough syrup. Everyone except me went to the doctor.

I was finally starting to feel a bit better on Friday. Then, midmorning, I suddenly noticed that I couldn't hear very well out of my right ear; it sounded like I was underwater on that side. Two hours later, it was seriously hurting. I mean, seriously. A friend once mentioned that she'd had a run of ear infections during college, and found them quite painful indeed, and man, do I ever concur. I have no idea how Boy Wonder contended with having all those ear infections when he was an infant and toddler. And I have NO IDEA AT ALL how Action Hero has managed to have two stealth ear infections, which weren't revealed until at the doctor's office for some other unrelated reason. Anyway, speaking of doctor's offices, I went to mine, where the following conversation took place.

My doctor: You have a lot of congestion at the back of your throat.

Me: I had even more there before the cough syrup kicked in.

My doctor (looking in my right ear): Yes, that one's infected. Very irritated. We'll get you some antibiotics. (looking in my left ear) That one's clear.

Me: I've had this cold all week, and my ear didn't even hurt until today. Can ear infections come on that suddenly?

My doctor (looking up my nose): Yes, because you don't have a cold, you have a sinus infection. It's very easy for bacteria to travel to the ear, once the sinuses are infected.

Me: Oh hurray. I haven't had an ear infection since I was five, you know.

My doctor: Uh-huh. Once the medication begins working, the pressure and pain should decrease and your hearing will return to normal levels.

So I trotted off to the drugstore, with my ear hurting like holy hell and my sinuses feeling grosser by the second. Upon arriving at home, I dosed myself with a variety of medications and sat down to wait for my ear to quit hurting. It didn't, and the other one started hurting too. Somehow, I managed to fall asleep anyway.

Until two o'clock this morning, when I awoke to the calm, soothing sound of the ocean. However, since I live in Wisconsin and haven't seen an ocean since I was 11, I quickly realized that something was amiss with my ears, which were trying to convince me that I was either on a beach or perhaps riding in the back of an airplane. Yes, really. Apparently fluid whooshing around in your ears makes a whole damn load of noise. I sat there for an hour and a half waiting for the sound effects to go away. They didn't, and the situation developed an unpleasant new dimension: every ten minutes or so, it would sound like someone was softly tapping on the outside of a seashell, and something would start oozing out of my right ear. (Hint: it wasn't the ocean.)

I began to suspect that my eardrum had gone and blown itself up, and wondered if I ought to do anything about that. After some consideration, I decided to take the time-honored course of going back to sleep and dealing with it in the morning. And deal with it I did. I'll be kind and spare you the details of exactly how the right side of my neck, and the hair behind it, looked when I woke up, but it was certainly enough to convince me that my eardrum had indeed ruptured. As an added bonus, my left ear--the one that wasn't supposed to be infected--staged a similar blowout two hours later.

So yeah, I have two ruptured eardrums (hey, at least they stop hurting once they blow), about 50% hearing loss (this will come back eventually, just not till things heal up in there), and an exhaustive supply of ear fluid, which continues to exit stages right and left (presumably this will stop soon, as there can't be THAT much more in there).

Not sure what the lesson is in all of this, but I'll certainly be watching the kids closely for signs of ear infection in the future!