urgent care

So the adventure of my day today was my trip to the Urgent Care at Ave Maria.

Woke up at 4:30 a.m. with extreme pain coming from my right ear. Aside from the extreme pain, it hurt to talk, move my mouth at all, and the right side of my head and face felt swollen. It had me up until 6:30am. I finally fell back asleep until around 8:30am, and when I woke up again, I was unable to hear out of my right ear. It was at that point I was VERY thankful for my ASL courses I took in college, because I was convinced I was going to lose my hearing.

*Sidenote* I shot up quickly from bed, in pain, and not very coherent since I was dead tired, and ended up stepping on my laptop, and cracking the screen. WOMP WOMP. Good thing I'm not attached to material things to to much...but it does stink.


Thankfully, Ave Maria has an Urgent Care, and thankfully they accepted my insurance plan,  so I didn't have to drive out to Fort Myers or Naples to see a doctor. 

What ended up happening was there was a back-up of hardened ear wax (ew) in my ear (not the left ear, that one was in perfect condition). My ear had to be flushed out, which was super weird, and felt uncomfortable. After flushing out my ear, they also found part of a q-tip that had been lodged in my ear. This was super weird, because I have no idea how long it was in there. I generally don't use q-tips to often because I am afraid of penetrating my eardrum.

Anyways, the end result after the flushing, was the doctor checking the ear again, only to find it inflated, raw and swollen. Thus causing the pain.

The pain didn't hit me until last night while chatting on Skype, after awhile of talking my ear began to ache.  The pain I felt in the middle of the night though was horrendous, and I did not want to feel that again. So that made me take off work and begin the doctor search. Thankfully, we had after-school off today already, so I didn't need to worry about calling off for that as well.

I got some antibiotics/eardrops prescribed, so that's good. I get to be that fool walking around with cottonballs in my ears. But I can hear again, so that's lovely.

My words of advice: Don't put q-tips in your ears. Be careful when cleaning out the ears. I had never had this problem before, and I asked the doctor what could be done to prevent it (it being the formulating of earwax). He suggested using hydrogen peroxide and warm water to clean out the ears. So, that might be good to try rather than poking around with q-tips.

Also, don't take your senses for granted. I fail to appreciate being able to smell, taste, touch, hear, and see, because I have the ability to do all these things. For the few hours that I couldn't hear out of my ear today, I became very much aware of my appreciation for it. It was a scary thought, the possibility of having my hearing limited. Don't take that stuff for granted. Smell a flower, try some new food, look at art...embrace your senses, they truly are a gift.

*Also returned to Ave Maria later on for a coffee date with Vitina. So that was lovely. :)