Figures that my last blog post was all about other people being sick. Two days later I came down with the Christmas plague as well. Mostly a cough, but plenty of mucus to go around…

I finally started feeling back to normal about a week ago, so I got back to my workouts. After two trips to the pool, I woke up Sunday morning with an earache.

I get mild ear infections pretty often, thanks to my rather lax attitude towards ear care. Here’s a quick list of things I probably should NOT have done over the last weekend:

• Used my waterproof headphones without ever disinfecting them (they’re kind of hard and ridged – good for scraping up your ear canals and depositing whatever bacteria they’ve been growing while sitting in a moist puddle in your locker)
• Scratched around with q-tips. (Oh please – like YOU never stick a q-tip in your ear.)
• Re-used an old ear wax removal kit. You know, with the blue bulb you use to squirt water into your ears and wash out the wax? In retrospect, a new one would have been smarter.

So, okay, I TOTALLY DESERVED an ear infection. Usually I have a day or two of pain, and then I see the doctor and get some antibiotic eardrops. Problem solved.

This time, I got the infection over a 3-day weekend. Then my doctor was booked all day Tuesday. By Tuesday evening, I was about ready to find an urgent care office when she said she could squeeze me in Wednesday morning.

Well, by Wednesday morning my ear was, as she described it upon inspection, “quite dramatic.” Translation: swollen almost shut and full of pus.

Yes, pus. In my ear. She couldn’t even see all the way to my eardrum. She had to poke through a CRUST OF PUS to get a swab to do a culture.

So I got the usual antibiotic eardrops, plus an oral antibiotic to keep the infection from spreading. Usually those eardrops make me feel better after just one dose. But… remember the swelling? And the pus? Makes it kind of hard for drops to go in, or to penetrate very far.

By Thursday evening, my ear was still swollen, and the pain was still excruciating. Here, let me describe the pain with another bulleted list:

• A constant, dull ache
• Some throbbing in time with my pulse
• Frequent stabbing pain that makes me scrunch up my face, stop talking midsentence, and/or pound my fists into my thighs and squeal like a baby
• Burning/itching sensation (just the icing on the cake, really)

Since Tuesday, I’d been taking Advil or Tylenol every three hours, and it was NOT KEEPING UP. So I made the doc squeeze me in again this morning, just in case my ear was actually on the path to explosion over the weekend.

This morning I got:

• A shot in my ass of some sort of hard-core antibiotic
• A “wick” in my ear, and a package of them to use over the weekend. These make a passage past the swelling for the drops to get in, and then make them stay there.
• A prescription for Vicadin.
• Orders to stay home.

So that’s where I am: drugged to the max and loving it. I’m pain-free for the first time since Sunday (although the occasional stabbing pain pierces the drug-induced haze). The swelling should go down today or tomorrow, but I can’t bring myself to care or worry all that much because of the afore-mentioned drug-induced haze.

Here’s hoping I’m back to normal by Monday.

Then I’m hiding the q-tips.

And buying one of these for my gym bag.