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Bookless Club: A columnist discovers just how much a bad ear infection hurts

This week's question: Of all the faculties, which one would you most hate to have compromised?

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Bookless Club: A columnist discovers just how much a bad ear infection hurts Back to video

Well, except that, in some ways, I’ve been revisiting childhood. If you were a kid who had chronic ear infections, I can now say I feel your pain. If you were a parent of such a kid, my condolences.

You see, I’m just recovering from bilateral ear infections. I can’t remember the last time I had an ear infection. Early childhood, perhaps. One of my kids suffered from chronic ear infections requiring surgery. On our many trips to Children’s Hospital, his agony was inconsolable. I now know exactly why.

My ear infection snuck up on me. At first, I thought I had a dental problem. The dentist poked, prodded and X-rayed — nothing there — but he noticed that my lymph nodes were swollen. Soon, sleep became impossible. Very quickly I could see where the cliché of an ice pick in the head came from. The infection wasn’t uni-focal; I felt sick all over. And then my hearing went kaput.

It seems my upper respiratory infection — the one we all had at Christmas — travelled up my eustachian tubes and filled the tympanic cavity with fluid so that nothing worked. And when there’s inflammation in the ear, you can also expect vertigo as the vestibular system can’t do its job when it’s infected.

I ended up at St. Paul’s sinus centre.

Clinic director Dr. Amin Javer had a look in my ears and asked me, “Why did you wait so long?”

The only answer I had is that there wasn’t unstanchable bleeding or a bone projecting out of the flesh — how serious could it be? This response was bred in the bone. When I was a kid feigning illness to avoid school, my mom would shrug, saying “If you’re going to die, die at school,” and usher us out the door. You had to have an axe in your head to necessitate a trip to the hospital or avoid chores.

Once, my general practitioner took my temperature and said, “I’m calling an ambulance; how did you not know you were running this type of fever?” My sanguine reply? “I thought it was just hot flashes.” It was a full-blown E. coli infection.

So, Javer cauterized both eardrums and then lanced them. The relief was instantaneous.

The deafness came quickly afterwards. It’s the oddest sensation, kind of like listening to someone vacuum outside your hotel room door. Sound is uneven and dislocated. My daughter arrived at my house and scared the dickens out of me. I didn’t know she was there until I saw her standing beside me in the kitchen.

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I’m slowly recovering my hearing and learning a great deal about the miraculous integration of our faculties in the process. In addition to being ridiculously clumsy, I’ve been “hard of thinking” as well.

Anyway, that’s how I spent my spring break. Missing calls. Not hearing the alarm. Tipping over. And let’s not forget the whining.

In other news, I’m looking forward to telling you about some therapeutic advances in knee problems. It turns out that when we don’t pay enough attention to our feet, the rest of our body can suffer. Kintec, a local company, in conjunction with UBC, has been working to make a device that — hallelujah! — alleviates knee pain and might offset the likelihood of knee surgeries.

And remember those two kids in the photo that ran earlier in the month? I heard from them! We’re meeting up in May when they’re both in town visiting family. I’m looking forward to telling you all about it!

Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former National Post columnist who lives in Vancouver. She writes The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. For more of what Jane’s up to, check out her website, janemacdougall.com

This week’s question for readers:

Question: Of all the faculties, which one would you most hate to have compromised?

Send your answers by email text, not an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at thebooklessclub@gmail.com. We will print some next week in this space.

Last week’s question for readers:

Question: What’s your old photo policy? Any chance you recognize Baljit or Andrea in my old photo?

• I decided to downsize my 150 photo album collection going back 55 years. It has been a lot of work but so enjoyable to see photos of birthdays, sports and travels again. I made an album for my husband’s family and for mine. I’ve also been giving old pictures to our friends and family, much to their enjoyment. It has been a worthwhile and rewarding experience.

• I have 46 photo albums stacked in three closets. When I moved, I thought the kids might want them but no one did. So there they sit — 50 years of memories. Ironically, the kids are the first ones to reach for them on a rainy day and will sit for hours reminiscing. The joke is on them because those albums will still be there to deal with when I’m gone.

When my old photos were stored in shoeboxes on a closet shelf, it was frustrating and time consuming to locate a photo, so I bought several photograph albums and organized everything. I can now find almost any photo whenever I want! The question is: Who will want these albums in the future?

• With my mother’s passing I inherited hundreds of old pictures. It’s a family history chock-a-block with blurry shots, repeated pics of the same thing, persons not recognized, etc. My parents never discarded a single one. I’m not a young person and the cull alone may take up the bulk of my remaining days on this earth. I would have to organize them chronologically and decide on whether to put them in albums, taking up space I Iack, or digitizing them which will take up even more of my precious little time. Or, I may opt to leave shoeboxes full for my son to inherit. I’m fairly confident he’d chuck the whole works without a second glance, erasing our family’s posterity … probably for the best.

• When my parents, grandparents and in-laws were still alive, I went through their mostly unlabelled boxes and envelopes of old photos and labelled them as best we could. Since then, I’ve acquired thousands of photos. On every one I have a label containing five points: reference number, date, place, event and names. Not hard to do if done at the time — impossible if one puts it off, even for a couple of years.

• My daughter recently gave me a wonderful birthday present — a digital photo frame. That was just the start. She had obtained photos from around the family, including many of my own and loaded them up, about 300 of them! I am in my 90s now and I hadn’t looked at so many of these photos for years. They go back to my grandparents in the 1880s right up to today. I have the frame set up on a table in the middle of the house and every time I pass by I see another lovely memory of friends, family, pets and places from my life.

• I have been trying for years to rid my albums of mountains, flowers, castles, etc. and return photos of friends and family taken over the years, knowing full well that when we’re gone from this world, those photos have no meaning to anyone else. I have now made a huge mess of all the albums I had carefully put together. Everything is now on my iPad and easy to delete! Should have done this years ago!

• I have a museum with many old pictures that have become my diary and list of friends. The pictures — of me at age four on the arm of my Battle of Britain hero, with my rugby teammates, wedding my true love amongst friends under St. Paul’s Cathedral, and among tribes hundreds of miles from civilization — have become treasured possessions. You made me think: There is a good chance you will find and enjoy Baljit and Andrea again.

• My old photos are in albums — about 70 of them — recording my life, my family and friends, my travels and my lovely garden. I am now 93 and realize that my daughter probably doesn’t want to inherit 70 old photo albums. So we are going through them together. She is delighted to see photos of herself as a little girl, family hikes in the Swiss Alps, etc. She selects photos which are meaningful to her from each album and I am making up a composite photo album of an abbreviated story which she can keep and share with her daughters.

I, too, have shoeboxes full of old photos. Occasionally I sort through them to decide which ones to toss. Last week, I came across a black and white photo of myself sitting on a sofa with a very handsome young man who was looking at me with adoration in his eyes. It was decades ago when we were 20 years old. My mother would have only taken that photo if she thought he was a future son-in-law. Who was that man? I would love to meet him again!

• Last summer, we stopped for lunch at The Bayview Brewery in Ladysmith. I, of course, had to use the loo! To my utter delight, there was a fabulous photo on the wall of my old high school classmate, Joni Mitchell. It was like she was alive for me. The decor was ’70s era newspaper and magazine pages on washroom walls. I love taking photos and will never forget this moment. My Mom always loved Joni’s music.

• I’ve only one photo box and one old-timey photo album — both full of memories. I add an old photo to my nieces’ and nephews’ birthday cards each year. Their parents go overboard! I still appreciate the value of old photos, especially of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when they captured long-ago family gatherings. My iPad photos don’t have that longevity although they are instantaneous!

The Bookless Club: What's your old photo policy?

The Bookless Club: Where do you sit on the family dinner spectrum?

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