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

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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.

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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........

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