Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
I Can Feel It Brushing Against My Eardrum
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
This weekend, while using a generic cotton swab to clean my left ear, I got a ball of cotton lodged in my left ear. Leonard and I tried to float it out, to tweeze it out, to get it out with another cotton swab - no use. Today I'm going to the doctor to get it tweezed/forcepped out, probably as per this useful document. It turns out Leonard and I probably shouldn't have tried what we tried; if you can't shake it loose or easily pull or tweeze it out, don't try to remove a foreign object from the ear yourself. However, punctured eardrums usually heal themselves within a few months. That's good to know.
