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In Reply to: Clean your ears! posted by Christine Tham on April 26, 2007 at 17:54:28:
I went to the doc last week because I had this ringing in my skull whenever I used an electric shaver on my left cheek. It was a gradual thing but became so bad my eyeballs were oscillating. As it happens, if the outer canal is blocked enough, vibrations rattle through the bones. Even walking drove me crazy.Turns out I had a wad the size of a champagne cork jammed in down against the drum. When I ride my motorcycle, I wear earplugs to save my hearing, but ironically, I was compacting cerumen over a long period. I didn't have a clue to what I was doing until my shaver was rattling my brain.
I tried digging it out but no luck. I quickly found out that the skin inside an ear canal is very sensitive. It became inflamed and painful, so I had to seek help. I told the doc that maybe blasting caps or a firehose would do it, but she had other ideas. She got out a 50cc syringe, and shot warm water up there so hard I thought I was getting a cranial enema. But presto! Out rolled this cork. I could immediately hear sounds that I hadn't heard in a long time, such as traffic and cursing, CNN, gunshots, ... all the little things one misses.
Follow Ups:
That works great. As a child, my hearing was insanely sensitive. It would dull down to normal around the same times of major pain which lead to getting them cleaned that way about twice a year. They would test my hearing before and after and it usually ended up with the guy saying "Hey Joe get IN here" because I could hear anything their machine could do.Things like crinkling paper or tin foil, lights at Sears, and just overall ambient noises were sheer torture for the first month after a cleaning.
After years of loud music, my hearing is now just normal. I love music and got into high end mostly because if things weren't reproduced properly it really annoyed me. It's been 15 years since I have had my ears cleaned so I assume I have grown out of it.
The funny thing is that it's not the hearing so much as the training to listen. I can pick out more things in music now than ever even though my hearing is no longer fantastic. Of course, I now have friends who are better at it than I. I joke about their "golden ears" and love to get their opinions on things.
and damned if you don't.I worked in an extremely noisy environment for a decade: pneumatic tools, hammering, loud machinery, etc. The wax build up was quite tremendous, and the doctor informed me that it was due to the earplugs I wore daily. Apparently the ear secretes wax to push foreign debris out of the ear, and it 'sees' the earplug as a huge bit of rubbish. If you use earplugs, including those in the ear headphones, expect to have your ears cleaned on a regular basis.
Then again, once your ears were cleaned ,your hearing acuity would have been increased dramatically, with the wax having protected your hearing....
I've noticed the wax build up ever since I started using IEMs. They also probably push the wax upwards every time they are inserted in the ear canal.
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