When Tolver was a child, his brother rammed a pencil in his ear, splitting the eardrum into 3 pieces. It took a while, but his eardrum healed back together and his hearing was restored. It still always bothered him, flying on leaky planes due to the pressure change, but other than that there was no impact on his life. Yet, Tolver always knew that as he got older, it would be one of the first parts to fail. And now it has.

Yesterday while swimming in the ocean Tolver got water in his ear. At first it was no bother, We came home, had lunch, and then took a shower. After the shower He cleaned out his ears with a q-tip as he normally does. Looking at the brown goo that came out of his right ear he decided that it was time to clean it out with hydrogen peroxide, as he has done many times before. That should have been the end of it. Instead he got a bit ill, had a fever, and lost most of the hearing in his right ear. Being in Hawaii and not having any health insurance there was nothing we could do about it except to go to sleep and hope it took care of itself.

Now its the morning after, and he feels fine but he is just about totally deaf in his right ear. We find it hard to go pay a doctor to tell him that he is deaf in his right ear. We feel as though it may just be 'swimmers ear' and it will correct itself in time, or he may just have to learn to live with no hearing in his right ear.

"If it's a brain thing, then I am dead already, if it's a failure of my eardrum then I am deaf already. I'm not in pain, so why should I go to see a doctor?" he says. "I am visually based, I depend upon my eyesight, not my hearing. I always said that I could cope with going deaf but not with going blind. So now I am going deaf, I can live with it." --Tolver.

link | posted by Reese at 2:52 PM

1 Comments:

 Anonymous commented:

Hear Ye Hear Ye.

A few days of discomfort and the self correcting mechanism rebalances itself. I Can Hear Again! And I now have antibodies for that particular bug so it will bother me no more!

No need for a expensive doctor as some of my friends recommended. No need for medications that would not have left me with antibodies to combat the next exposure to this problem. No need to worry at all.

Tolver.

» Monday, September 18, 2006 10:16:00 AM 

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