I Get My Ear Problems from My Dad

                                                     I Get My Ear Problems from My Dad

Catherine A. Brereton  

December

I get my ear problems from my dad. Every day, after showering, I take the tip of a cotton bud and roll it between my damp fingers to squash down the soft fibres. When it is denser than dense, and almost hard, I push it inside my ear, as far as I can stand, and wiggle it until the back of my throat tickles and I cough. It’s always dirty when I pull it out, globbed up with sticky, shower-warm wax that ranges from the colour of pale apricots to the colour of the fake teak table at which I now sit, sipping hot tea, remembering exactly who I get my ear problems from.

I know I shouldn’t treat my ears this way. Countless people have told me and countless internet articles and medical books have warned me that all I succeed in doing is to over-stimulate my ears, and that the more I prod, the more wax they’ll create and besides, everyone knows that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, put anything in your ear. Not ever. But I refuse to heed their warnings and poke away anyway, every day, even though my grandma once had the tip of a cotton bud come off its pastel-coloured plastic stem and become lodged deep in her ear canal, well beyond the reach of a fingertip or a pair of tweezers. She had to have it medically extracted, so I’m told, but I don’t think it ever stopped her poking things inside her ears. Perhaps that’s where Dad got his ear problems. He is his mother’s son and I am my father’s daughter.

I haven’t seen my dad for two days short of two years so I don’t know how his ears are these days. He’s rarely home when I call, but then I rarely call home. By the time I get to a breathing point in my day I know that he’s probably enjoying a whiskey-fuelled nap and he’s never been a great talker anyway. The last time we spoke was back in June when Granddad died, and Mum wasn’t home; he was forced to answer the phone. I forgot to ask about his ears. Plus, it seemed a little odd. “Hey, Dad, sorry about Granddad. How are your ears?” When I talk to Mum she doesn’t tell me how Dad’s ears are, but then she only mentioned in passing the deaths of my Uncle Guy and Aunt Joan so I assume that the state of my father’s Eustachian tubes is not that high on her list of things to be communicated with the absent daughter.

It is his right ear that gives him the most trouble and it is my right ear that gives me the most trouble. I am sure that this is not merely co-incidence. The most trouble that I can complain of was the need to have them flushed out a couple of times in the ten year period between 1996 and 2006. My right ear would get so stopped up that I couldn’t hear anything other than low, background noises, amplified to a deafening roar by my distorted ear canal. Oh, the relief of that pop when the warm water finally worked the wax loose. I was never anything other than amazed by the sheer quantity of wax that one small, regularly cleaned ear could hold. I hoped the nurses were not disgusted, but deep down I believe they probably were.

Small potatoes, though, to the trouble that Dad had ten days short of ten years ago, when an ear infection went horribly wrong and settled deep, deep, deep in his inner ear, beyond the reach of antibiotics. It grew and spread to the base of his brain. Bacterial meningitis. Swift. Frightening. Lethal.

Dad was delirious, hallucinating, barely able even to moan when the ambulance fought its way up the mile-long, un-tarmacked, snowbound track that traversed his beloved moorland, barely connecting his truly out-in-the-sticks house with the small, rural, and hospital-less community beyond. It took far too long to get him to a hospital; it was touch and go for seemingly endless days while his body was pumped full of drugs and Mum complied with the rules by reporting his illness to the government authority responsible for monitoring serious diseases. They were to decree whether the out-in-the-sticks house should be quarantined for public safety. I joggled my six-month-old daughter on one hip and held the hand of my four-year old, all while watching them both for signs of illness.

When I last saw Dad, he’d been battling another ear infection—this one a year old—which caused a nasty yellow discharge to ooze constantly out of his ear. He always had a handkerchief at the ready and tried hard not to complain at the pain. In the back of my mind, unspoken, was the rare, but ever-present threat of his meningitis recurring. The doctors, with dizzying indecision, put in, took out, and put in grommets, small tubes of plastic designed to ease the pressure in his inner ear and reduce the frequency of infection. I wonder, from 4,000 miles away, whether his ears are grommet-clad or grommet-free these days. I have lost track and it’s not the sort of thing one readily asks.

June

For the first time in almost a year, I spoke to Dad yesterday. It was Father’s Day and I’d put off calling him until late in the day—I don’t quite know why—and by the time I tried to call him my international calling card wouldn’t connect, probably because of too many absent children all trying to make phone calls to their distant dads. Instead of doing battle with the tinny telephone line and the two second delay on either end, I hooked up my webcam and signed in to Skype. Mum—who is much more adept with computers these days than I ever could have imagined she would be—set the laptop down in front of him and disappeared to make a cup of tea. Dad panicked, anxious that something might go wrong and he’d have to touch the strange piece of apparatus that was transmitting my moving, talking image (no doubt by some kind of sorcery) from 4,000 miles away right into his living room. Dad is getting old. His hair is short now, cropped close to his head, barely an inch long, but it doesn’t disguise the white that has spread from his temples back across his scalp. His moustache looks thin and grey and his skin has deep crevices cutting through his weather-beaten tan. His eyes crinkle up when he listens to me, and he screws his face up in an effort to hear me more clearly. He’s going deaf, I know. I should expect that, I suppose, given his ear troubles.

We talk for 45 minutes, although much of that time is spent in repeating myself and waiting for him to fumble for words to answer. He’s not that old, really, he’ll only be 65 this year, but suddenly he seems to be just a short distance from frailty and I swallow down my anxiety at the distance between us. Innocently, he asks me did I know that Mike Wilde died? And Uncle Paul? Oh and last week Alan Hadfield died too—he was only 61, you know. My anxiety creeps up another notch and I get up from the kitchen table to pour a drink. I ask him if he got the socks I knitted for Father’s Day but they haven’t arrived yet, and I make a mental note to knit him a balaclava for his birthday in November, something that will keep the weather off his face and his ears protected when he’s out walking the moors with his dogs.

I’m cheated out of goodbye. My laptop, which has been temperamental since the day I bought it, suddenly overheats and the screen dies. Skype emits a strange sound as it disconnects us mid-thought. I wish I hadn’t left it so late in the day to call him. He’s gone and I’m left contemplating the best yarn choices for his balaclava and whether we can afford a flight to England soon.

March

My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. I swallow down my latest mantra alongside the enormous antibiotic tablet I’ve been prescribed for my latest ear infection.  Just ten days ago, in response to an over-vigorous nurse’s attempt to flush out my ears, my balance system gave out. The doctor diagnosed labyrinthitis with a secondary middle ear infection, loaded me up with a cocktail of drugs, and sent me on my way. Four thousand miles away, Dad lies sedated in an intensive care unit, a similar—albeit far more potent—cocktail of drugs being pushed through his bloodstream. The chances were so very slim that there weren’t even odds for it. He’s three days from retirement and I’m three days away from him, if the weather co-operates. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying.

Mum is at his bedside; my brothers are travelling to be with her. Dad doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. I call my doctor who tells me not to fly if I can possibly avoid it, but I’m already looking at flights.  My medications sit silently on the kitchen table; my suitcase is on the floor. I don’t know what to pack. There’s snow on the ground in Kentucky; I think it’s probably only raining in England. No use asking Mum. She hasn’t seen daylight for two days now; there are no windows in an Intensive Care Unit. I stuff in extra underwear and two balls of yarn. I can knit Dad some more socks on the plane, maybe. I wonder if he ever wore his balaclava. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying.

I have my phone in my pocket, vibrating other people’s thoughts and prayers. I take another tablet, this one for the wash of dizziness that threatens to overwhelm me. My lover tries to hide her anxiety. Our house has never been cleaner, and there’s yet another pan of soup bubbling gently on the stove. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying. My dad is not dying.

We both jump when the phone rings. I fumble to retrieve it, fumble more to answer, repeatedly yell “hello” while the international line stumbles to connect us. I pause, finally, remembering the distance and the inevitable two-second delay. I’m standing in the kitchen, staring through the brown bamboo blinds at the six inches of snow on the roof of our car, watching the birds heave huge chunks of the homemade bread no-one could eat last night. The soup bubbles behind me, I can’t even remember what type it is. My brother is low-voiced. I strain to hear through the thickness of the infection that lines my ear, rigid with terror. My lover steps across the room and softly runs her fingertip across my cheek to catch the one salty tear I couldn’t prevent from escaping, and my ear throbs painfully as the room starts to spin. Through the increasing hum I whisper to her, “My dad is not dying…”