Most of you know that John had back surgery in September. For over ten years he was living with constant pain in his back. This past summer the pain reached new levels and the compression on the nerves started to severely decrease the strength on his left side. We decided to bite the bullet and go for surgery. John's PCP pulled a few favors and got us in with the Chair of Neurosurgey at Penn. Normally there is a six-ten month waiting list for surgery, but considering John's level of weakness he was fast tracked and had surgery within three weeks. Surgery went well and we can safely say that it was a success. John can now function like a normal human being. One "side effect" of this new normal functioning John, is that he now can sleep soundly through the night. Which means we've discovered that soundly-sleeping John snores like a bear.
What does this have to do with me being deaf?
I used to be able to sleep through just about anything - ask my mom, you could have set a bomb off in my room and if I managed to survive the blast, I still would have been sleeping soundly. Something happened in the last year, I don't know if being a mom has the added benefit of being a super light sleeper, but now I can't sleep through loud noises. This includes John's newfound habit of snoring. Once we realized that John's snoring was keeping me up, we decided we had three options:
- I could continue to get shitty sleep
- I could smother John with a pillow
- I could start wearing earplugs
Considering I'm one cranky bitch when I don't get enough sleep and really wouldn't be fair to Ari if I was sentenced to life in prison (we've all watched enough CSI to know I wouldn't get away with smothering John) we opted for number three. I started wearing the pink foam earplugs and life was good. John decided we should take a good thing and make it better, so he grabbed me a pack of silicone mold-able earplugs which were supposed to work better than the little pink foam ones. Sounds good right? Thinking it wouldn't be much more difficult than molding my old field hockey mouthpieces, I decided to give it a go and mold these things. The whole process was supposed to work as follows:
- Mix the two putty like substances together until it is a teal color
- Gently push in ear
- Wait 10 minutes to harden
- Remove
This was working well up to the 60 minute mark when the putty was still putty like. I tried to remove the putty and it wouldn't come out. Then John offered to "help" me get it out. In a moment of weakness, I consented to have my husband attempt to extract the putty from my ear. I'm sure you can imagine where this goes - in an attempt to extract the putty from my ear, John pushed a piece down into my ear canal. Instantly I lost hearing in my right ear. The sound was not muffled, sound was entirely gone. John offered to get a BBQ skewer to try to stab it and pull it out. Thankfully, my better judgement returned and I declined. The following morning I made an appointment with an ENT, who couldn't see me until the next day (Friday). When I finally saw the ENT and she pulled this little piece of (now) hard silicone out of my ear, it was damn near orgasmic. I could hear again!
Lesson learned here kids? Never confuse your engineer husband with a medical professional.
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