While the plane was descending on my flight from Toronto last week, I felt
my right ear go into some distress. An
avid gum-chewer most of the time, I realized too late I had forgotten to pop the
trusty Trident into my mouth having been
too absorbed in conversation with my seat-mate, the HR man from Sobeys. By the time I noticed the crackling in my
ear, it was too late. I deplaned and
went home where my ear condition worsened as the day progressed.
That evening and the next day I did extensive research on
"airplane ear" or “barotrauma” and felt myself to be quite an expert by Saturday
evening. My room-mate Tom refers to me
as Barb Fullerton, MD….Mountain Doctor. The MacMillan girls call that DWOL….Doctors
WithOut Licence. 
Mountain Doctor
I treated myself according to online direction—hot
compresses, yawning, gum-chewing, valsalva.
Valsalva. That’s the medical term
we doctors use which means pinching your nostrils and exhaling to cause the
ears to pop thereby unblocking the Eustachian Tube.
Valsalva
Eustachian Tube.
That’s the canal in the ear that allows air to flow into the middle ear
to balance pressure. As you can see, I
am quite confident in my medical knowledge…a little TOOOO confident as it turns out.
Eustachian Tube
By Sunday morning I was deaf in my right ear, and the pain
was heading toward excruciating. I
decided it was time to consult a DWL----Doctor With Licence. One millisecond after she looked into my ear
she said, “It’s an infection.” I was
shocked; I had not even considered that!
I had misdiagnosed. I could
hardly believe it. I got my two antibiotic prescriptions filled and headed back
to the hills with my room-mate Tom at the wheel. He didn’t say much but I saw his eyebrows
raise and his eyes roll when I admitted to him that I had been wrong in my
diagnosis.
Tom, uxorious as usual, waited on me hand and foot with tea and blankets and hot compresses. By late afternoon, I pried myself off the couch, grabbed a knife, and told him I was going to the garden to get some greens.
“You can’t do that!” he exclaimed. “You have an imbalance in your Fallopian
Tube!”
Tom has a way with words.
He has a way of mixing them up.
It makes me MAD because I
think he is just being careless, and if he gave ANY THOUGHT WHATSOEVER to what he was going to say, he wouldn’t
make such RIDICULOUS mistakes!
Fallopian Tubes
“My fallopian tube!” I yelled. “MY FALLOPIAN TUBE!!!???" I’m impatient with this quaint little quirk
of his at the best of times, but fueled by pain and painkillers, perhaps I was
a little harsher than usual in my response.
“I mean your Estrogen Tube,” he sputtered, his eye on the
knife in my hand.
Estrogen Tube
“My ESTROGEN TUBE!?”
I screamed. “I DON'T believe it! EUSTACHIAN TUBE! I have an infection in my EUSTACHIAN TUBE!!!” I yelled, waving my hands and stamping my feet
for emphasis.
“Right,” Tom repeated, cowering in his armchair, his eye still
on the knife. “Eustachian Tube.”
