Stupid perforated eardrum!
 

Usually I am more cautious about the hole in my right eardrum, but the famility was going tubing on the lake and I couldn't miss out. Needless to say my face met the water a few times and now my eardrum pulses with pressure. Those drops for Swimmer's Ear are excrutiating and don't work since my pressure, pain, and deafness aren't caused by water in my ear canal.

Anyone else with this annoying problem have a remedy? If I don't get it out today I'll be posting Wednesday about a "Stupid ear infection!".

I'd say make a "Stupid Doctors Visit" on Monday and not deal with a "Stupid ear infection" on Wednesday.

Gatorade speaks true.

I also have a perforated ear drum and find that if I don't wear ear plugs everytime I go swimming, I usually end up with ear infection. My doctor gave me ear drops once (that are actually for eyes- but can be used in the ears), and they are the only drops that have ever worked for me without causing pain.

Doctor's are booked today, but made an appointment for tomorrow afternoon. Unfortunately, I think the infection has already set in...you know the feeling gremlin, the one where you want to stab at your eardrum with a q-tip.

Try webmd.com

Although... as of late, it's hard to get proper results. I think their search functionality is jacked up or something.

But ya, good for the times when you don't really feel like goin to the docs.

For the most part, when I get an ear infection in my bad ear, it doesn't hurt because all the buildup that normally occurs in an ear infection and causes the pressure against the ear drum, just drains out of my ear. It's disgusting, but it leads to less painful ear infections.

Good news!

Saw a doctor, an audiologist, and a specialist today. Got anti-biotic eardrops with steriods to reduce inflammation, found out I have awesome hearing for my age group, and got scheduled for surgery in August. The surgery is to fix my perforated ear drum. What they're gonna do is go in and pull out my ear drum a bit, graft some skin from my neck onto the hole to patch it, then use adhesive to glue my ear drum back in place. I'm sure it sounds more painful and distgusting than it really is....right? :thumbsup:

I had a surgery kind of like that for mine only they took skin from the back of my ear lobe. It covered about a millimeter of the hole, but there is still 2 millimeters open. They were thinking about doing a different surgery tympanoplasty or something, I believe. Never got around to doing that, though.