Last Friday, when I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t hear out of my left ear. That side of my head was stone deaf. Nothin’.

There was no pain or other symptoms, so I didn’t think I had an infection. I figured it might be wax in my ear canal, so I bought some over-the-counter wax remover. I used the drops Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but nothing came out of my ear. And still on Monday, I was deaf in that ear.

Not hearing anything with one ear is very disconcerting. Of course it was difficult to understand someone talking to me, especially if they were on my left side. But everything, in general, was muffled and garbled. Any kind of background noise made picking up specific sounds extremely difficult.

I became jumpy of the world around me. A person would suddenly appear beside me, seemingly out of nowhere because I couldn’t hear them approach. While driving, I’d hear a sound that I couldn’t immediately recognize or locate the source, and it would startle me.

Noise up close to my right (good) ear, like from my boys talking or shouting beside me, came in much louder and shriller than normal, and it almost hurt. I also found it difficult to judge my own speaking volume.

I was annoyed and bothered by the half-deafness over the weekend, but on Monday it really showed itself as a disability. I was in a local mall to look at some furniture I was sent to inspect, and I just couldn’t understand the salespeople speaking to me.

With the background noise of people moving and talking, and the overhead music, and the generally bad acoustics of the shops, it took all my concentration, and some lip reading with the context of the conversation to understand anyone. Then when I left the mall, and left the constant noise, it all left a ringing in my ear. The ringing was loud and constant, for a couple hours until I went to sleep for the night.

Fortunately, I was able to see a doctor Tuesday morning. Diagnosis: wax in my ear canal.

They used some drops and warm water in a syringe to clean it all out, but that didn’t work any better for them than it had for me over the weekend. So then the doctor used a long scooper tool to reach in and dig it out. This, I did not like.

The doctor said, “This is going to be very uncomfortable, and will make you cough.”

That “make you cough” statement didn’t register with me when the doc said it, but the first time she dug in my ear canal, it set me on one of the biggest coughing fits of my life. But after the first dig, I didn’t get the coughing urge — but the discomfort was incredible.

Oh my God! Holy crap! And a whole bunch of other, X-rated, exclamations!

That digging in my ear canal hurt like crazy. I was prepared for some discomfort, but the intensity was surprising. At first my natural instinct made me flinch, but the doc told me I had to be still (for obvious reasons).

The doc apologized, “I’m sorry. I know this is really painful. The wax is impacted pretty deep, and there’s a lot of stuff back in that part of the ear canal that no one is used to feeling pressure on.”

She dug in a couple more times. “You can’t hold your breath,” she warned. “Just concentrate on breathing normally. And yes, you can clinch your fists like you’re doing, to help steel against the feeling.”

After she dug in four or five times, and apologized after every time, I needed to ask her how many more times she was going in. I felt I’d do better if I just had an idea of how much longer I had to endure.

“Just one more time,” she answered. Then she did.

She told me that there was still some more wax in my canal, but it was too close to my eardrum for her to dig with her tool. “I got three-quarters of it,” she said, “and that should make that last bit easier to get with drops.”

The ordeal was over. She told me to wait a few days, to let my ear rest, and then over next weekend, use the ear drops and rinse out the last bit.

I “recovered” from the ear canal work quickly. Actually, I got over each time within a few seconds of the dig. The pain didn’t stay with me long, which kind of surprised me. I mean, something that hurts that much seems like it should have some lasting effect. By the time I was out of the doctor’s office, I couldn’t even remember exactly what the action felt like.

I can remember my reaction, and the intensity level, but I can’t really describe the kind of pain. It was really weird to feel that sensation one moment, but then have the feeling fade not just from my nerves but even from my memory so quickly. A really strange situation.

At least the procedure restored maybe half the hearing in my left ear. I’m better, but not back to normal yet. I can hardly wait for this weekend when I can try to get the last of the blockage out of my ear. I am so ready to hear normally again.

Bullgrit

If everyone knew how incredibly hard it is to raise children, no one would ever have children.

If everyone knew how incredibly wonderful it is to have children, everyone would have children.

The thing that worries me the most about raising my kids is the fear that my errors could screw them up for the rest of their lives. And sometimes I don’t even learn that I’ve made an error until a long time after the mistake. I’m afraid that I’m going to make some subtle mistake today, but I won’t learn of the dramatically bad results for another twenty years.

Having two children just means I get double the chances to screw up, or I get double the results from just one screw up. No, wait, I take that back. It’s not a multiplication equation, it’s an exponential function.

With two kids, I get: errors = x².

There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and each minute gives another chance to really screw up raising a child. So with having two children, I can make 2,073,600 mistakes each day.

Yeah, I totally feel this way. This is why we decided to stop at two children. When I meet parents who have three, or four, or even six kids (like when my mom and step dad combined all of us), it just boggles my mind to contemplate the potential number of serious mistakes that could be made.

And then I see something like this parked in the local mall parking lot:

Bullgrit

About 10 years ago, Cowgrit and I were out and about after a dinner date. We decided to run over to the nearby Walmart to pick up some items before heading back home.

The Walmart is situated at the end of a strip mall of about a dozen or so other stores down a covered sidewalk. We pulled into the shopping center parking lot, (Cowgrit was driving, I was the passenger), and slowly drove down the lane next to the sidewalk. It was well after sundown, and the stores along the sidewalk strip were closed.

As we moved along, we noticed a woman and daughter (around 8 years old) walking down the well-lighted, but otherwise vacant, sidewalk. A man followed them about 20 feet behind. He was talking to them, and showing agitation with his hand gestures. The woman kept her daughter moving forward while keeping an eye on the man behind them. It became more obvious that there was an uncomfortable dispute between them as we passed by.

I mentioned to Cowgrit how that woman seemed afraid of the man. I asked Cowgrit to pull back around and lets pass them again with our windows down. When we passed them again, we could hear the argument: he was pleading for the woman to come back to him, and saying, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

This was a time before cell phones were so common, so neither of us had one. We needed to get to a phone, but most of the stores were closed and dark. The only open store on the strip, besides Walmart was a game store.

Coincidentally, I was a regular patron of this game store. It was situated pretty close to the center of the strip of stores, so the woman, girl, and man walked right by it. Inside the store, the lights were on, and there were a handful of people hanging out. (There had been a gaming event there that evening, and it had just finished up.)

I told Cowgrit to stop and let me out so I could go into the game store and use their phone. She was to continue driving around, watching, but staying out of harm’s way. She stopped the car long enough for me to get out, and I walked fast up to the game store door.

The woman, girl, and man had just passed the store front, and I could hear the man continuing his call for the other two to return with him. I tried to open the store door, but it was locked. I rapped on the glass to get the attention of someone inside.

One of the workers said, “We’re closed.” I couldn’t hear her, but I could read her lips.

I held my hand up to the side of my head with my thumb and pinky extended, to mimic using a phone. When all the workers and patrons were looking at me, wondering what I was trying to do, I held up my hands, using my fingers to show the numbers 9, 1, 1. My audience was confused at my antics, but the worker girl motioned for the nearest patron to unlock the door.

By this time, the woman and her daughter were walking back towards me, with the man still following and still pleading. (They must have turned around back this way while I was trying to communicate with the game store people.) I could tell the man was probably drunk or stoned, and the woman was very upset. The little girl was following her mother’s direction, and was scared.

The store patron, a skinny little teenager with a box of Magic: the Gathering game cards under his arm, turned the lock to open the door. When the door opened, I said, “Let this woman and girl in, then lock the door.”

The people inside the store seemed to figure out what I had been trying to explain mutely through the window, and they all moved forward as the woman and girl entered. “Thank you, thank you,” the woman said to everyone as she went inside. I stood there a moment longer as they relocked the door, and as the aggressive man stepped up just a moment too slow.

I backed off quickly — the crazy guy might have had a weapon. He gave me a dirty look through bloodshot eyes, but then turned to the glass door. He put his hand on the glass and pleaded once more to the woman. Inside the store, the patrons, a half dozen “gamer nerds” (tall and short, skinny and fat, middle-aged and young) stood at the window with the woman and girl behind and among them. One of the workers was dialing the phone.

I walked off the sidewalk and into the parking lot just as Cowgrit pulled up with the car. I opened the door and hopped in. We waited there for a minute, until the crazy man gave up and walked away down the sidewalk. We then just went on to do our own business.

A week or so later, when I visited the game store again, I asked the guy behind the counter what happened that night after they let the woman and girl in. This worker didn’t know what I was talking about — he hadn’t been working that night, and hadn’t heard anything about the incident.

So I have no idea how the whole thing ended. The last thing I saw was a group of geeks letting a terrified woman and girl find safety in their herd.

Bullgrit