Inkless

Summer is off to a bang! Well, if by bang, we mean molar extractions, ear mysteries and pain, pain, pain. I start my medical tale with my wisdom teeth extraction. I go in last Saturday and get a general dental cleaning. She does her thing and notices I have some wisdom teeth needing removal. So we take the x-rays and they do indeed need to be taken out. I had one taken out about a year ago and that left three.

20 minutes, some local anesthetic later and the upper right wisdom tooth is gone with another one of those lovely caverns to show for it. With that sucker out, that only left two of the bottom two. Come Monday, while the upper wound is still somewhat painful, I have this Shanghai-medical school graduated business-man of an oral-surgeon removing my lower wisdoms. He talks the whole time about how I need to get into high finance and how that is where the whole of American opportunity lies. Hell, whilst under the scalpal, I am in no mood to argue the issues with that statement. The guy does some practiced yanking and out come two teeth in about 5 minutes. He is on a schedule that day with 20 other kids in line. (400 dollars a pop – not a bad day.)

So i have three gaping holes in my mouth – the two lower being much more painful than the upper one. I’m eating mush everyday and on a consistent stream of amoxicillin and ibuprofin. Good stuff.

Now, if this was the only health related thing I was going through, I’d be A-OK. Wisdom teeth and some pain are fine, as long as no dry-socket infections occur. However, my hearing in my left ear has been going insane in the past week and a half. I’m still dry-socket paranoid. There’s probably some elitist paranoia term for it, like drysocketaphobia. (I’m not creative, I know).

At first I thought it might have been caused by the teeth extractions, but I remembered this hearing issue beginning a few days before anything was pulled from anywhere. Here’s the problem, but it is a bit hard to describe:

My left ear hears sounds as if they have been altered or distorted through some voice-changer or electronic device. Much like those voices heard in pop and electronica songs, I hear a very electronic tinge to the sounds coming into my left ear. In fact, music has started to sound bad if I cover my right ear and hear only though that.

Today, I went to the good ol’ Tang Center and got my ears washed. It did not help at all, so now I’m being referred to a specialist. Honestly, I’m a bit anxious and of course, the plethora of ear-related maladies exposed on the internet does not help. From what I have gathered, I have Ménière’s disease without the vertigo, which defeats my hypothesis.

The only symptom is the sound distortion. If any of my humble readers have any clue what this is, feel free to enlighten me. I suppose I will know by my Friday appointment with Dr. Ears anyhow.

Well, that’s really all so far, pain and anxiety in the medical sense.

One piece of excitement: I heard a song advertising fuse.tv and it was quite touching – above the normal riff-raff that is mass marketing. Here’s it is:

Title: Question

Artist: The Old 97s

Album: Hit By A Train: Best of the Old 97s (2006)

Hopefully, I’ll be able to hear that song in true sound without distortion soon enough! Wish me luck.

‘Tis All.

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