I am prone to ear wax blockages. It's true, gross though it may be. Every few years, I have to go to the doctor to get my ear irrigated. The first time this happened, I left the office aware for the first time that footsteps of others were audible.
My left ear is currently clogged to the point where I can't hear what people are saying. I am hosting a party this afternoon. I feel like instead spending the day with my head tilted to the left, moaning. I've tried all the RiteAid remedies and have decided to do something new: ear candling.
After driving all over the city this morning, I finally located a pair of Wally's Beeswax Ear Candles. When Corey gets home from work this evening, exhausted from a 5am to 9pm day, I am going to make him light the candles on fire and shove them into my ears. Hopefully I will find some relief. The package promises that the softened wax will drain from my head and I'll be able to hear like new again.
Until then, I will spend much of the day saying, "Pardon?" "What???" and doing airplane-cabin tricks to try and pop my ears open.
After years of nomadic temporary employment, advanced degrees, and chocolate ice cream, a rugger with a love of knitting and a cyclist with no domestic skills signed a Ketubah and bought a house in Pittsburgh.
5 comments:
wait, how does this thing work? don't catch on fire! i'm confused and concerned.
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/candling.html
Have you tried hydrogen peroxide, or the low velocity squirters that you clean babies' ears with?
that quackwatch link didn't address the possibility of warming the earwax so that it would drain a bit, and it spent a bit too much time on stupid user mistakes that have nothing to do with whether or not the procedure works. Even so, I doubt it's a legit thing to do - probably time to make that appointment with the doctor to have your ears cleaned!
Incidentally, do you know that there are two types of earwax that different ethnicities are more likely to have? Also, in some Asian cultures (Korean, I think?) it's common for family members to clean out each other's ears very fastidiously, with long bamboo sticks. You should have married a Korean!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earwax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_pick
Yes, please be careful. Everything I've ever read about coning has said that it was disproven in many ways. The stuff that comes out doesn't actually contain any earwax (it's soot and wax from the candle) and that the candle does not create enough of a vacuum to pull wax out.
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