The first sign of trouble was a bulge in my left armpit. It didn’t hurt, but every time I applied deodorant I wondered what it was. On several occasions I asked the “substitute doctors” (PAs or NPs) and a doctor once. They all said pretty much the same thing—It didn’t appear to be muscular, so it likely was a lymph node doing its job. It still made me uneasy, especially when it lasted for months.
Before going on, you need to know some background on my left ear. It wasn’t a normal ear at all.
When I was about five years old, probably just playing by myself at home, I heard a sudden “POP!” in my left ear, and my ear hurt—A LOT! I cried, but my Dad said he knew what to do to make my ear feel better. He smoked cigarettes, and his solution was to gently blow warm smoke in my ear. Before you criticize him, know that he only had a 6th grade education, and that was in a one-room schoolhouse in the sticks in southeastern Oklahoma. Anyway, the pain eventually subsided or I got used to it. But from that time and for many years, I had a slow flow of smelly gunk in my left ear. No one noticed it yet, but I also lost some hearing in that ear. And in retrospect, I’d say there’s a good chance that was related to the many, many sinus infections and tonsillitis over my childhood.
I don’t know how long it was before my mother decided to take me to an ear doctor. It had to be quite a while, though, because of what he found. I don’t know that “doctor’s” name, but I can tell you for sure that he was a quack. He used a long, pointed instrument made of brass and wrapped with cotton on the end to clean out the smelly stuff in my ear canal. There were several weekly appointments that were all the same—wrap cotton around that poker, wipe it around in my left ear canal, and repeat. He must have gotten it pretty clean after a while, because he found a growth attached to the hole in my eardrum and cut the polyp off. I guess that must have made him pretty proud of the job he was doing, but it would have been better if he had prescribed an antibiotic to get rid of the infection and patched the eardrum!
I finally told my mother I was tired of going through the same thing over and over, and that was the end of it. But that was NOT the end of the persistent infection in my ear, and of the frequent fevers and sinus trouble.
I must have been eighteen or so when my sister told me about an ENT she was seeing, and suggested I go there. Dr. Don Matheson had an office in near south Fort Worth, and I saw right away that he was a kind and personable man I liked. He cleared up the infection quickly (antibiotics, of course), and suggested an unusual operation. In the hospital he made an incision all along the back side of my ear and folded it over to reveal the workings of my hearing equipment. After clearing out the residue of the infection I’d had for more than 10 years, he wedged a bone chip into my hearing bone assembly to replace part that had been eaten away by the infection. Once it healed up he did a hearing test and was disappointed to find that my hearing had not improved. He offered to make a second attempt to restore it.
After a second operation he determined that my hearing was better, and had improved as much as he could accomplish. I had talked to him, wondering why such an infection might have started, and he offered his opinion: It probably was caused by swimming in polluted water. Armed with that detail, I asked if there was anything he could do to keep water from being held in my ear, and he offered to modify my ear canal to allow it to drain more freely. I agreed, so in one of those surgeries he scooped out some of the ear canal lining to create a more effective drain. While it seemed a good idea to both of us that the time, that turned out to be a regrettable decision.
It was on a weekend many years later that the pain started. I was nearly seventy years old, and had experienced many earaches and other pains, but this was bad. As stated at the beginning, I had been concerned about a lump under my left arm. Later I noticed a wide, soft bulge on the same shoulder above the clavicle. None of the health professionals I talked to were concerned about either of them. But on this weekend day, my left ear ached, and my entire left shoulder was in pain. Nothing would relieve it. My wife insisted that I go to an urgent care center, and I complied.
The doctor in the urgent care was a small Asian lady with a lovely manner. She asked questions and spent some time on my shoulder and looking in my ear. After bringing out a few instruments, she pulled out a black ear bud tip hiding in the hollowed-out area of my modified left ear canal. The rubber tip had not deteriorated much, considering the amount of time it had been in there. That’s when I remembered the time over a year ago when I lost the tip of a pair of cheap ear buds I used to listen to music from my MP3 player.
She also sent me to another room to get an x-ray of my left shoulder. After that she sent me somewhere else to get an ultrasound.
The sonographer used a Doppler ultrasound machine to inspect the shoulder area, and spent some time looking at the underarm bulge area. I asked a lot of questions and looked at the screen with her. She said she wasn’t supposed to tell me a diagnosis, but it was clear from what I saw, and from her reaction, that I had a blood clot under my arm.
I didn’t get the results from the urgent care doctor until the next morning, but the instructions she gave me were to go to the emergency room right away. I insisted on going back to see the doctor and thank her before continuing to the hospital, much to my wife’s frustration.
When I got to the ER, they put me on IVs in both arms so I could get antibiotics and blood thinner. A day or two later I got a needle biopsy of the “fossa” that protruded from behind my left clavicle. They determined that there was no current infection in the tissue, but that it had definitely been badly infected before the IV antibiotics had wiped it out.
After five days someone decided I was okay to go home, but I needed to continue with antibiotic pills and blood thinner for a month, just to be safe.
I was fortunate that the blood clot had not traveled to my heart. That would have been tragic.
I also saw an infection specialist, and had a follow-up appointment later. Her determination, as I had surmised, was that the ear bud had lodged in the hollowed area of my left ear canal and triggered a reaction in glands under my arm that indirectly caused the clot and infection that could have killed me.
So that was that. I could have died from an ear bud.
