Wax on, wax off

I'm going to talk about earwax now. If you're not a fan of the almighty wax, you might want to take a step back.

I have had earwax problems for what I feel like is my entire life. The problem being that I have an obsession with sticking Q-Tips in my ears and digging for gold. If I go too long without Q-Tipping my ears, I become like an addict in need of a fix, and I switch from the coke to the crack just to keep myself from illin', and crack is my fingernails. So, yes, I'm that random person that you'll see in her car absolutely GOING TO TOWN on her ears, trying to dig her fingers down as deep as she can go. I'm sick, I know.

Obviously, this type of meticulousness isn't good for your ears. You can run into lots of dangers, like irritating them, scratching the insides raw, or, say, poking out your eardrum. Obviously, since I still do it, I've never poked out my eardrum and all of this practice has helped me learn exactly how far in I can go with my cotton-tipped friends. I know I shouldn't be doing this, but it's a habit and I can't help it. Restraint is no good, and sometimes it's even an absent minded thing and I don't realize I'm doing it until I'm doing it. It's bad.

This habit has landed me in the doctor's office a few times when I was younger. More times than I thought; I recently picked up a copy of my medical records since Edgar and I moved to Long Beach and were no longer near the only doctor that I ever went to in California, and I was going back and reading through all of the stuff dating back to when I was born. I went to the doctor at least four times for this. If I was my mom, I would have glued earmuffs to my head and been done with it. But I would end up back in the doctors office because sometimes, instead of scooping up the earwax on the Q-Tip, a little bit would get pushed farther in, farther in than I go because, like I said, I know how far I can go. Do this enough times and those little bits of earwax add up and can form a layer that covers your eardrum and then you are absolutely miserable. Because now your hearing is impaired in that ear and all the sounds are muffled, everything is quieter, and when you watch TV you have to watch it at the same level that your 82 year-old grandfather does. BECAUSE YOU CAN'T HEAR. Not being able to hear does yield a few advantages, like helping to dull the sound of the voices of really annoying people or lessening the deafening roar that is your cat when you come home, but for the most part: not that fun.

So when I was younger, I would end up at the doctor, and he would put these drops in my ear to dissolve the wax. After letting the drops do their thing, he would sit me up and use this high-powered, Super Soaker type thing to flush out my ear. Oh, sweet relief. I would be able to hear again and my ears would actually feel clean, and that would be the only thing that would keep me from having to attack them with Q-Tips. Eventually that squeaky clean feeling would go away, and then I'd go back to the Q-Tips, and then the cycle would start all over again.

Other times, the problem wouldn't be the earwax, it would be the ear canal itself. After getting swabbed by a Q-Tip two or three times a day the skin can get dried out and irritated. And when it's irritated it gets painful and swollen. In these cases, there's not really anything you can do but lay off the Q-Tips, AS MUCH AS YOU NEED THEM, and swab the area with peroxide day and night.

Since I've gotten older and started working and not had the luxury (or in the last year, the insurance) of being able to go to the doctor whenever I needed it, I've taken to self medicating in these situations. You can buy these little kits at the drugstore that are eardrops designed to break up the wax in your ear, and they come with his little bulb that you can rinse your ear out with once you're done. THESE DROPS SUCK. Not that they don't do the job, it's just that they do the job eventually. I go to them whenever I have that "oh, crap" moment when I pull the Q-Tip out and realize that my ear is clogged again. So I lay on my side, I put the drops in, and then I fidget for 10 minutes as the bubbles tickle the inside of my ear (this is actually the best part, because you can hear all the bubbles fizzing and popping right there inside your ear and it's kind of funky). But then the bad part happens, because you know that bulb I mentioned? Yeah, the directions say to use it to flush out the drops and wax with warm water. Tell you what: It doesn't work. You just end up with a water-logged ear, no matter how you contort your head for it to drain, so then you go around feeling like you have swimmers ear and everything sounds like it's underwater on that side. I eventually discovered that if you just stick the end of a wadded up tissue in there after 10 minutes and flip the side that you're laying on so that it can drain, and don't use the water, that you can knock it out after a few treatments and you don't have to feel all water-logged. They're not as good as the doctor treatment, because that's a one shot deal. These take days.

So right now, I'm in the midst of a double whammy, a clogged left ear that is also swollen. It began with the clogging. I was trying to avoid having to go to the drops, sometimes I can angle the Q-Tip just right so that I will be able to swipe up the offending wax, and, let me tell you, when I do that, it is JUST SO SATISFYING. I love nothing more than to pull a Q-Tip out of my ear and see the end covered in wax. Well, I might be exaggerating there, there are a few things that I love more than that, but this is right up there. It's like that guilty pleasure that you get when you pop a really big pimple. Anyways, it didn't work. And somewhere along the line, my ear started to swell. And now, AND NOW, my ear is clogged and my ear canal is super swollen and it hurts like a mo fo. It hurts reeeeeeeeaaaally bad. Like THIS MUCH bad. If I press on my cheek right in front of my ear, it hurts. If I press on the back of my ear, it hurts. If I press up on my ear, it hurts. It even hurts down into my jaw on that side when I eat. I've dealt with this before, and peroxide always wins in the end, but this discomfort is just so annoying. And what's more annoying is I know that I HAVE BROUGHT THIS UPON MYSELF. I know, I get it. And you know what's even more annoying than that? Is that I can't stick an effing Q-Tip in there to make it better! And it itches! I NEED MY Q-TIPS. The muffled hearing out of that ear is what is bugging me the most, though, and I'm hesitant to use the ear drops while my ear is swollen like that, because I'm worried that the drops will sting my raw and angry ear.

What's a girl to do? (Hint: the answer here is not to tell me that I should lay off the Q-Tips)

I will survive. I WILL survive. Earwax will NOT be the end of me.