Piercing

Good morning. Coming to you live from a cool campground in the middle of cornfields with a stream of blood dried and crusty on the side of my face. Looks like I was hit in the face with a 2x4! Don’t worry, I wasn’t. Here’s the deal…

We had a great day yesterday. I went out in the field with Erk, Phyllis and Don to check out what this pheasant hunting bit is all about. I got to see the beautiful country side that Erk enjoys while looking for birds to shoot. We walked and whispered (apparently gotta be kinda quiet while trying to flush out birds) and just took it all in. The wind was blowing pretty good which wasn’t helping my ear ache out, but I just put my bright orange hood up. I told Erk that next year I’m gonna be “an orange highlighter for Halloween.”

We headed to a second spot to check out and Phyllis and I found ourselves sitting in a big open green field chattin’ while the men hunted with the dogs. Again, no birds to be found so we headed into town for some lunch. We went back to the same lunch spot we hit on Monday and enjoyed the day’s special :) Phyllis asked to borrow our truck to head to a sort of Amish country, while I opted to come back to the trailer to lie down. Erk came back too for a snooze. I was woken up not too long after dozing off with a piercing ear ache. Like, as in brought me to tears. Erk and I both got on our phone (amazing what phones can do now a days) and looked up on WebMD what to do about an ear ache. Found the old remedy of hydrogen peroxide. So I tilted my head to the right (with a tear rolling down my cheek) while Erk poured a cap full in my ear. Ahhh, relief. Instant relief.

I hung out here at the campground for a while while Erk and Don headed back to the field. Got some more scrapbooking done! Erk and Don came and picked me up and there I sat between the 2 of them in Don’s truck, Freckles (the doggie) in the backseat, speeding down gravel country roads. Can’t you just picture it? We met up with Phyllis back at their motel and hung out for a bit, heard that their neighbor at the motel (Joe) had an incident earlier in the day that took him to the hospital. Joe happened to pull in as we were hanging out outside so we waited for him to get off his cell phone to hear what happened. Apparently, he was in a field with his dog and went to lift this dog over a fence, while bending over a stick went right up his nose! YEEE-OUCH! It bled and bled, he said, so he began wondering if there was something stuck up there, and proceeded to head to the ER. He said it was a little sore, but fine by the time we were talking to him. We joked that we didn’t even know there was a hospital in this town, but good to know.

We invited Joe to come have supper with us in town and he did – we had fun joking around and giving our waitress a hard time. We had delicious fried chicken and I stepped out a minute while we were eating cause it was bedtime back home and time to say goodnight to the chitlins. As our time at the restaurant continued, I was having a bit more increasingly sharp pains in my ear. We headed back to the motel and laughed some more (fun to talk about old times in the office with Phyllis) and my face changed. Erk saw it. It went from happy Ernie to “ok, this is really bothering me.” We said our goodnights and headed back to the campground. I was driving and while chattin’ with Erk, I had to stop talking here and there cause my left ear just hurt so bad. We got back to the trailer and the pain was SO intense, I thought a baby was gonna pop outta my ear. The pain seriously reminded me of child birth, but in the side of my head! I was pacing the trailer, crying my eyes out, trying not to go insane from the pain. Holy cow it hurt. I was literally shaking in the knees and my lower lip was quivering like ya do when you are freezing cold, all because of the intense pain. Erk was so calm and encouraging, trying to hug me but I couldn’t stand still. Trying to have me look him straight in the eye which, when I could focus helped, but then I’d have to look away to cry. Can you imagine!? Then a sort of gurgle noise and I happened to grab a Kleenex, wondering if I’d catch some puss or something. No puss, just blood. A steady stream of it. At that point, Erk called my doctor’s office back home to see what we needed to do. We were waiting for a call back and after 20 minutes they hadn’t called, so he called back, then another 20 minutes, and we get a call back but my phone didn’t ring. Went straight to voicemail. So I called back and was wired directly thru to the doc on call. She was so kind, and apologetic that this was happening on my “vacation” and told me “you need to go to an ER or med center to get it evaluated.” So out the trailer door we headed, into town to that same ER we had just learned about a few hours earlier. By this point, my ear had been bleeding for an hour. We pull in and there is one other car in the parking lot. As we walked in thru the abandoned looking ER entrance, we came around the bend and saw 2 nurses, one in plain clothes and the other in scrubs. We talked with them about the issue and they paged the on call doc. While waiting for the doc to come in (technically he was a PA), the plain clothes nurse went to take my temp in my bloody ear, to which I quickly asked, “can you take my temperature in my other ear?”

Wondering if that was the sorta folk we’d be dealing with (taking a temp in a bloody ear!?!), we were very pleased with the doc who came in to check me out. He first checked my right ear (the ear I had surgery on in April, I’m SO THANKFUL this didn’t happen to that ear!) and he said that eardrum was bulging. It’s been sore in there, but nothing like my left. He checks my left ear and was like, “umm yeah your eardrum has ruptured.” He left the room and came back saying with his arms out as if he’s flexing his muscles, “what, were you just gonna tough this one out?” I said “I wanted a helicopter to swoop down and take me to the hospital but that didn’t happen.” And he laughed, reminding me that we aren’t back home, but are in the middle of nowhere :) He then said “you Nordic women are tough!” HA!

He printed some information on ruptured eardrums and wrote me a stronger script (I started on amoxicillin 2 days ago in addition to the pink eye drops, so I’ve been on meds) and we started heading out. While walking I was reading about the eardrum where it said “depending on where the hole or tear is in the eardrum, you may have some permanent hearing loss.” So I asked him where the hole/tear was or if it was rather large. He replied, “umm, there is so much blood in your ear, I couldn’t even see your eardrum!” He recommended I see my ENT that did my ear surgery as soon as we get home. BEAK! So there is a possibility that I may have some permanent hearing loss in my other ear. For now, it’s completely clogged, can’t hear anything at all outta my left side. At least with my right, I could hear a little bit (larger crowds were hard, but I could manage thru reading lips). Now it looks like lip reading is gonna come in handy! I was used to tilting my head to the left to hear better about 6 months ago, now the rolls have reversed…

So back home to the trailer we of course came and headed to bed. I fell asleep pretty quickly but then was woken up with PIERCING pain in my ear again. I took some deep breaths and waited patiently, nearly in tears again in the dark, but the pain finally went away when something else “gave way” in the ear. This morning I was met with more blood on the pillowcase and of course, all dried to my face.

And now here I sit. Erk headed out to hunt (it’s pouring rain, YUCK) and I’m gonna take it a bit easy this morning. They’ll pick me up for lunch, but between now and then? I’ll get cleaned up and listen (one eared) to some music. Maybe do some scrapbooking and hopefully my email will stay up and running longer than 2 seconds (now that we moved campsites, I can’t stay connected to email very long)! I hope this finds you doing well today…