There are several different causes for earaches, and they even come in different forms. If you’ve never experienced one in any form, count yourself fortunate. An earache is not easy to ignore, but did you know you can have an ear infection and not even have any pain? Such an infection can lead to serious complications if left untreated.
While I don’t consider myself to have had more than my share of them, I’ve had enough earaches to know they rate only a notch below the proverbial “sharp stick in the eye.”
Like so many others, both of my children were plagued with earaches when they were younger. I remember one night when my daughter started crying with an earache about ten o’clock at night. It was a few years past doctors’ house calls and a few years before after-hours clinics. The only way to get medical help that night was to drive 50 miles through icy weather to a hospital emergency room.
Having lived with earaches all our lives, my husband and I did our best to ease our daughter’s pain, not expecting anything terrible to happen before morning. The next morning there was drainage on our daughter’s pillowcase. One eardrum had ruptured during the night. Of course we felt terrible about it.
We rushed her to a doctor the next morning as soon as we could get there. He said the other eardrum was ready to rupture and it would do less damage to the eardrum if he punctured it. To this day, our daughter, who has borne three children and endured a kidney stone, remembers that puncture as being more painful than anything else she has been through. But fortunately it lasted for only a brief second. This procedure, called tympanocentesis, is usually performed with the patient anesthetized. I don’t know why the doctor didn’t anesthetize her unless he felt the eardrum was so near rupturing that there wouldn’t be time to do so.
Our son had major ear problems from birth. He had his tonsils removed and his eardrums punctured and the fluid behind them drawn out when he was four. This procedure is called myringotomy. Fortunately, his were punctured while he was anesthetized. His hearing was down to 60% by that time and the doctors could find no other way to remove the fluid from behind his ears. By the time he was seven, the problem was back as bad as ever. At that time, tympanostomy tubes were inserted in his ears, and that took care of the problem for a few years.
When he was in college, he had a terrible earache and went to the college infirmary, which he and most of the rest of the student body referred to as “Voodoo Village.” The medic who looked in his ears said he saw nothing wrong.
So he went to the hospital emergency room. When he told the emergency room doctor about the situation, the doctor said the reason the medic at the college infirmary “couldn’t see anything wrong” in his ear was that his ear canal was swollen shut. He prescribed antibiotics and other medications which helped after a day or two.
Last year my husband’s ears were stuffed up for so long he almost gave up hope of ever getting them opened. He could hardly hear anyone talking to him, but the sound of his own voice was so amplified it made his head hurt. It took several trips to the doctors,a number of prescriptions, and many weeks before he ever found any relief. Our doctor eventually prescribed a short round of low-dose steroids to open his ears, and thankfully, it worked. This episode was supposedly caused by allergies, which is a common cause of sinus and ear problems.
One thing we both remember from our childhood is the times we had earaches that were hard to discern from a toothache. If you’ve ever had one but not the other, you have a pretty good idea of how the other one feels.
My first experience with ear problems happened when I was a baby, so I have no memory of it. I was told that an ear infection had spread to the mastoid sinus behind my ear and it was greatly swollen, to the extent that I had to be hospitalized. That was not an uncommon thing in the days before antibiotics. A mastoid infection can be a serious complication if left untreated.
When I was in the seventh grade, I had an ear infection which the doctor treated by giving me a penicillin shot. Mother had made Malt-O-Meal muffins and I found that chewing them helped ease the pain, so I ate six of them. That would indicate that perhaps even chewing gum might help ease the pain of some earaches.
Twenty years or so later, I had a terrible earache all night. The pain soon involved the whole left side of my head, but stopped at a virtual line drawn in the exact middle of my head, from my chin over the top of my head and ending at the top of my spine. I went to the doctor the next morning, and was surprised when he couldn’t see anything wrong in the ear. Then he asked if my neck was stiff, which I suppose was obvious from the way I held my head. When I said it was, he ran his finger down my spine to the fifth vertebra, and announced, “There’s where it’s coming from. It’s radiating from that vertebra.” I had experienced a whiplash-type injury to the fifth cervical vertebra a few years earlier, and am still bothered with it from time to time.
The next ear problem I remember was a number of years ago when I had gone to bed and soon started hearing a sound like crumpling paper in my right ear. I had no pain, but the noise bothered me. I got out of bed and went to a recliner, where I spent the next few hours. Suddenly the noise stopped and I felt a warm liquid running down my cheek. My eardrum had ruptured and I had never felt any pain.
Last night my friend called and in the course of the conversation she mentioned that earlier in the day her daughter had driven her for a medical procedure and the daughter’s baby, who is about 18 months old, had been very fussy all day.
Perhaps because I had been having some ear pain myself, I asked if the baby might have an earache. I have found with my own kids and grandkids that when they are unusually fussy, it turns out to be an ear infection a large percentage of the time.
An hour or so later, my friend’s daughter called me to say she had taken the baby to the walk-in clinic with which our town is now blessed. The baby had an ear infection. The baby’s mother thanked me profusely for suggesting it might be an earache, for which, of course, I deserved no thanks.
Research has shown that three out of four children will have at least one ear infection before the age of three. Very small children may have an ear infection, but if it’s a new experience to them, they may not know how to describe the pain. It’s especially important, when dealing with a baby too small to tell you where it hurts, to have his/her ears checked as soon as possible if he/she becomes very fussy for a time and you know of no other reason for it. By having his/her ears checked, you might be able to keep that precious baby from having to endure more pain than necessary.
When I was a child, the pain of earaches was often treated with heat, such as a salt-filled sock heated slightly in the oven, or a hot water bottle. In such cases, great care must be taken not to overheat the sock, hot water bottle, or anything else used for the purpose of supplying warmth. Today we have heating pads, and I often use one myself when I have an earache. One can also take acetaminophen(Tylenol)or ibuprofen, or aspirin if you’re in the habit of taking it. But if there is any chance one might have the flu, aspirin should not be taken for fear of developing Reyes Syndrome.
Sometimes I can ease an earache by putting a heating pad at the back of my neck. If that works, it’s a good indication the pain is radiating from my spine and nothing is wrong with my ears.
Any time you or a family member, especially a child, has an earache, you should seek medical help as soon as possible. In some cases, antibiotics are not required, such as when the problem is in the outer ear. This type is sometimes caused by a fungus rather than bacteria, and will require a different type of treatment.
Much information on earaches can be found by typing “ear infections” into Google or other search engines. But that should never be used in place of hands-on medical care by a medical professional.
Lately I’ve heard that research has indicated that a child may recover from an ear infection just as soon without antibiotics as with them. I hope no one takes that to mean it’s safe not to have a child with an earache checked by a doctor as soon as humanly possible. To neglect it may lead to far more serious complications than “just an earache.” And besides, who would want their child to suffer from the pain of an earache any longer than necessary?
