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Wellness Wednesday for July 24, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

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..Perforated eardrums..

Can any ear doctors or people with relevant knowledge can advise on how to test out whether a perforated eardrum has healed or not ?

I don't usually hear whistling sound while doing the valsalva maneuver (fancy speak for holding your nose and blowing air into the ears/nasal cavity).

Seeing as there was a very high pitched whistling sound while blowing air through nose into the ear cavity following a painful ear episode, and a whistling that stopped when ear was plugged, i'm dead certain it is a perforated eardrum.

As blowing more air in there is probably not a good idea, how can I find out it's healed so I can clean* it more thoroughly and all that?

*ear cleaning for people with wet wax isn't as simple, getting the stuff out manually risks that some might stick at the end and possibly get stuck to the eardrum and cause an infection. Okay, I admit that it took 30 years of cleaning them with paper to get here, but after they heal I'll be putting a bit of oil in there and then rinsing them out with warm water in the shower.

How long has it been? Did you have any discharge from your ear during the ear pain? Any decrease in hearing that has since recovered?

Short of having someone stick an otoscope in your ear, you're looking at somewhere between 3 weeks to 2 months for a perforation to resolve. I'd strongly advise against putting anything in your ear till time's you're not having issues and time's up. This might be hypocritical given my love of q-tips, but you're better safe than sorry.

There was never any discharge. The ear has felt blocked since day 1, which was not this week's monday but the one before that, so cca 10 days.

It got much better after I put one dose of cipro ear drops in it and some cooking oil later. I should've written down what relieved the pain but it went from "have to take ibalgin to get some sleep" to almost imperceptible.

Somehow, I lost the cipro ear drops, I don't understand how because there's no clutter, I've search the entire room including the fridge and the waste bin and all that.

I don't think it's perforated anymore, somehow. There was a really high pitched whistle the first day. Since then I've tried gently re-inflating the cavity in the ear.

I can't seem to get it right, aka, regain normal hearing.

Anyway, put some drops of oil in there, then cleaned them out with paper. Put some betadine solution in there, cleaned that out too. I've got an appointment for wednesday, I guess I'll know what's the status then.

Hopefully it'll heal in time and I'll get normal hearing back.