In the darkness the trees are full of starlight (henwy) wrote,
In the darkness the trees are full of starlight
henwy
  • Mood: blah

The surgeon general says: Don't stick stuff in your ears

My mom is going in for surgery this morning. She's finally going to go and try to get her ear drum repaired after one failed surgical intervention decades ago. When she was a kid my uncle, her older brother, stuck a chopstick in her year and punctured the ear drum. Since then, she's had a significant bit of hearing loss in that ear. The more obnoxious issue is that she has to be really careful about water getting into the ear canal. Whenever any amount of water gets in there, it causes an ear infection which from what I hear is obnoxious and unpleasant. Most people would have had a doctor try to fix this a long time ago but my mom has always been one of those people who felt you shouldn't take pills (much less undergo surgery) if it weren't absolutely necessary. It was hard to even find aspirin in our house when I was a kid.

Anyway, I'm not sure what her doctor said to convince her this time, but she's decided to let him try to fix the damage. It won't restore any hearing but it should stop the whole water problem if it works. He cited her a success rate of something like 97%, which I think she's still a bit concerned over. I still remember how she just about freaked when I told her I had my eyes lasered while I was in Chicago. Even though the odds of something going wrong were incredibly small, the risk of something like blindness was just too horrible for her to contemplate.

I'm pretty sure there's no actual risk in today's procedure beyond the risk you normally take whenever you go under general anesthesia. Either they can craft a new eardrum out of one of the ear bones or they can't. Still, it's something to keep my fingers crossed over.
Tags: family
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