I Can Hear Clearly Now, The Pain Has Gone

Self indulgent complaint about having been sick to follow:

What started as a slight scratchy throat on Wednesday turned into, well, five very unpleasant days.

Normally when the Balabusta gets a cold, she has a sore throat for twenty-four hours, while her chest fills with gunk. Then she coughs and sneezes until the gunk is cleared. Then the cold is over.

On this occasion, the lungs were pretty much clear, and my eustachian tubes got the gunk.

Every time I swallowed, twin jabs of pain in my eardrums. Up and down in intensity, but hard enough at its worst to make me flinch each time. You know how many time you swallow in the course of, say, a minute? A lot of times. More times than you would think.

Advil, didn't work. Throat spray, suggested by the doctor who looked at me for two minutes on Saturday morning, didn't work. NyQuil worked because NyQuil knocked me cold for eight hours at a time, during which time I could not feel my ears. Instead I romped in fields full of golden autumn trees, and walked on ceilings, and argued with long-dead philosophers. They were great dreams. Then I would wake up and swallow.

I looked up middle ear pain. Apparently it's mostly found in babies. This did not make me feel better.

Last night I was nearly hysterical, because this had been going on for five days, and pain that's tolerable for a while gets hard to deal with over a long period of time, and today I HAD to go and spend six and a half hours at a training. No way to cancel unless I was actually in labor, or had surgery. I tried to go to sleep without the NyQuil because I had already taken the Sudafed. (One small blessing, I got to go on a patent-medicine spending spree behind this. I love buying boxes of pills to be taken four to six hours apart. And the nightime Sudafed was on sale.)

Slept shallowly, no more golden trees or philosophers, and woke up swallowing and swallowing desperately, and hurting more each time.

It was one AM. I had to get out of bed in five and a half hours, max. I wandered into the bathroom, took a slug of NyQuil and lay down to read until it kicked in.

Half an hour later, the pressure dropped. No pop, no warning, just swallowed and that time it didn't hurt like crazy. I have no idea why. I went to sleep. My ears are still slightly sore when I swallow, but they have not returned to flinch level, and I got through the day without drugs.

Healthy ears are the best.