the short version, at age 2 he evidently stuck a Q-tip in his ear and the cotton came off rendering him deaf in that ear. 9 YEARS later it pops out on its own. seriously great news for the kid, seriously how fucking dumb could a doctor be not to notice something the size of a Q-tip head stuck in a 2 year olds ear…or however old he was every other time they checked him out.
not exactly a strong rant but what the hell.
I saw this story the other day. I’ll be deeply surprised if someone doesn’t get sued for this. I mean, that is not a small object! It’s not like someone blinked and missed it. Poor little guy thinks he is deaf in one ear for a good portion of his life, and one day can suddenly hear again… excellent news, but so incredibly irritating to hear that there was a simple cure and all those doctors missed it.
That’s Socialized Medicine for you.
I attended the same preschool for ages 3 and 4. One day during recess, I started thinking about how you could hear the ocean if you held up the big shell at my grammy’s house, so I wondered, could you hear the ocean if you listened to rocks too? I picked up a pebble and tried to listen to it. As you can guess, it fell in my ear and I couldn’t get it out.
I told my parents and they didn’t believe me. The doctors who treated me for frequent ear infections when I was small never saw anything.
When I was 14 I got a bad ear infection, and the nurse said something I’d been hoping to hear for years “Hey, I think I see something.” I told her it was a pebble, and my mom countered that it couldn’t be because no one in the past 10 years had ever found any sign of the mythical pebble.
Do you have any idea what a rock covered in a decade worth of earwax looks like? It wasn’t pretty, but my mom finally believed me!
So yeah, I can see how the q-tip might have been overlooked. You’d think they’d of looked harder considering his hearing loss, but objects can apparently remain hidden.
Man, how bad did she feel? Were you able to use the guilt? 
My son had a bone infection and I didn’t believe he was sick for *two days * and I still feel guilty over that one!
Aren’t we supposed to rank the Daily Mail down there with The Enquirer? I once posted a link to a column, complete with rants about the horrid woman who wrote it, only to be told “grain of salt, dear.”
Here’s the BBC on the story: BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | South West Wales | Deaf boy's cotton wool bud 'cure'
I have a hard time believing this. I have had some ear problems and one of the tests that do involves putting a speaker-type-device on the bone behind the ear. I do not see how he would not have able to hear something on that test that would have led them to believe he was not deaf in that ear.
Deaf guy here. Frankly, I’m going to have to wait for some professional verification. None of this sounds right. (Damn puns.)
Why would one malfunctioning ear give the kid the symptoms reported? People shouting to him? Having to turn up the volume on the TV? If his father had to call him 8 times the kid was ignoring him.
Supposedly the other ear worked fine. Do the experiment—stick a finger in your ear and have someone talk to you. Does it change the quality of the sound much? If it does, can you turn your head and improve things?
I have a friend who plays classical piano. Deaf in one ear. It’s not much of a problem.
My mother had a bead in her ear for some thirty-five years (with no hearing problems). When the bead was finally discovered, she distinctly remembered the day she last saw it - when she was five years old and playing “stick beads in your ears”.
I’m deaf in one ear (otosclerosis from age 20, I’m 47 now), and I can tell you it is a MAJOR problem. Unless someone is talking right at me and I can see their mouth move, I have great difficulty in understanding them. If someone is calling me from another room, forget it…I might hear some ‘noise’ but I don’t recognise it as speech. Once I go to bed and turn my ‘good’ ear into the pillow, I become profoundly deaf (which has it’s advantages sometimes, I admit).
However, that has not stopped me either from playing music. I am a self-taught-play-by-ear classical guitarist with some skill if I may say so. Music is very different to verbal communication though, and I can fully appreciate the problems this poor kid encountered particularly through those childhood years when social communication and networks are most important. He SHOULD sue the pants off whichever specialist failed to diagnose his problem.
That privatized medice for you.
Oh, I used to love that game!
What?
No, seriously, what?
Played a similar game in band camp.
So doctors in the US never make stupid mistakes?
Getting that out must have been one hell of an eargasm.
I don’t get it. The Tucker-Babe was having some hearing problems a while back. I, with only a flashlight and without benefit of an otoscope, was able to look into her ear canal and see a huge wax plug waaay down pretty much filling the diameter of the canal. She scheduled an appointment with an ENT, who affirmed, “Yeah, it’s a BIG one,” and he scraped it out. Problem solved.
Nah, Socialized Medicine is bed shortages in Canada.
[QUOTE=Originally Posted by elfkin477
Do you have any idea what a rock covered in a decade worth of earwax looks like? It wasn’t pretty, but my mom finally believed me!
So yeah, I can see how the q-tip might have been overlooked. You’d think they’d of looked harder considering his hearing loss, but objects can apparently remain hidden.
IvoryTowerDenizen]
Man, how bad did she feel? Were you able to use the guilt? My son had a bone infection and I didn’t believe he was sick for *two days * and I still feel guilty over that one!
[/QUOTE]
I guilted my mother for years over not believing me about an earache. It got so bad green pus started coming out. She insisted I must have been playing with the Irish Spring soap. I was 7 and absolutely indignant. :mad: When I finally was taken to a doctor it turned out the infection was so bad I burst my eardrum. Lasting scar tissue. To this day a doctor will comment on the scar tissue and it all comes back to me. I remember laying on her bed with my ear on a heating pad like a dead thing. It was my first realization that ‘Mommy’ wasn’t perfect.
My brother had severe ear infections throughout his early childhood; when he was five years old, they were “old hat” by then and the doctor gave him the usual dose of The Pink Stuff. (Synthetic penicillin.)
Turns out that that last severe infection destroyed his middle ear…the “anvil” that hits your ear drum was completely gone. Eaten by infection.
My brother is now 32 years old. He has a Masters in music. He is still deaf in one ear.
And my mother will never ever ever be able to get over her own guilt for not getting a second opinion. For not taking it seriously enough, after all those years of “ordinary” ear infections.
His horribly severe ear infection was less obvious than a Q-tip lodged in the ear, of course, but ya know? People fuck up. They make mistakes. They don’t pay attention. Sometimes it has tragic consequences. This is why I could never work in medicine. What is mundane and ordinary and forgettable–and thus forgivable in most lines of work–has potentially horrendous consequences.