Double Ear Infections:
Not as Glamorous as They Sound

I miss the good old days—the days when being slammed with a double ear infection meant throwing myself on the floor and screaming in pain, while my dad warmed up the car so he could take me to the hospital, and my mom got me dressed and reassured me that I wasn’t going to die from exploding eardrums. It’s just not the same now that everyone expects me to act like a grownup.

When I crawled out of bed at 1 am Friday morning, convinced that my eardrums were about to explode and kill me, I couldn’t throw myself on the floor and scream. That would have woken up the kids. Instead, I had to tiptoe outside in the dark, get into a freezing cold car and drive to the nearest hospital myself.

Sitting in the hospital waiting room, it hit me: When you’re five years old and you’re cuddled up against your mom in emerg, you look cute. When you’re 51 and you’re sitting there in your pajamas because you forgot to change, you look like you should be dropped off at the nearest homeless shelter.

One perk of being in the Too Old To Be Coddled age category? The drugs are a lot more fun. Along with a prescription for ear drops, I was given three Tylenol 3’s to dampen the pain, and a prescription for more if I needed them. I needed them.

When Five-Year-Old-Me had an ear infection, my mom massaged my back, made sure the house was quiet so I could sleep, and kept my hot water bottle filled with comfortably-warm water. The 51-Year-Old-Me took the codeine-laced Tylenol 3’s and fell into a disturbing, hallucination-filled sleep with my head on an old heating pad—a heating pad that I’d accidentally left on its incinerate setting.

To be clear, I rarely look like my profile picture, anyway. That was done by a professional photographer (“Turn your head to the right…a little more…now, drop your chin…hang on, let’s try this with a paper bag over your head…”). But when I finally woke up Friday morning, I looked, and felt, like that woman’s near-death old aunt. The left side of my face and left ear were covered with weird, heating pad-induced dark red blotches, my jaw and neck were swollen from the infection, I couldn’t close my mouth properly, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t hear anything and I couldn’t chew.

When Five-Year-Old-Me was sick, I got tons of sympathy from my parents. When 51-Year-Old-Me staggered into the kitchen looking like that, my kids immediately decided it would be hilarious to move their lips funny to see if I could still lip read what they were saying. Clearly, the only person who was going to feel sorry for me was me.

Yes, I miss the good old days—the days when being sick meant someone else’s world stopped turning because they had to take care of me. On the other hand, my ear infection has cleared up, and I have a nice stash of Tylenol 3’s left over that I’m going to save for future injuries. Five-year-old-me had to ask permission to get a simple baby aspirin. I now have a bottle of powerful, hallucinogenic painkillers at my disposal. I guess growing old does have its perks.

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