Upon Visiting Dr. ENT

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Ears are a musician’s best friend. Unless one is a titanic genius like Beethoven, hearing loss can be a career-ending disaster. So, recently, after a morning shower, when I removed the cotton swab I had been using to clean my right ear and noticed that the stem of the swab no longer held a small ball of cotton on the end, I became concerned. Sure enough, after many, many years of cleaning my ears with cotton swabs (a very pleasurable experience, I find), the dreaded warnings of my parents, siblings, teachers and friends had finally come true -- I had a wad of cotton jammed up against an ear drum.
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It was like when I was hit in the face by a basketball last fall, and one of the lenses of my glasses was knocked out, without my being aware of it at the time, as I was, understandably, slightly dazed. (I don’t play basketball, never have. I can appreciate the athleticism of the sport, especially when played at the higher levels, but I hate being in an over-heated gym, and I always flinch when that horrid klaxon goes off to announce someone is entering/leaving the floor. As a former rugby player, I also dislike sports that have so many time outs—just play the game and have your meetings afterward.) Anyway, this annoyingly long analogy refers to the fact that, during the remainder of that basketball-dazed day, I wondered if I had received a slight concussion, because my vision was blurry. It wasn’t until I casually took off my glasses to rub the lenses clean that I discovered that the left lens was missing. Now I was dealing with blurry, better yet, fuzzy hearing.
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I tried to remove the wad of cotton myself using first wooden toothpicks (stupid, yes, but I’m a guy), then the sharp, curved end of a device intended for flossing teeth. No luck, and, luckily, no damage. So I went to the school doctor in hopes that he could help. I took a clean cotton swab from which I had removed the cotton from one end (Why take the original? Who wants a ball of day-old ear wax in their breast pocket for a couple of hours? Shrek?). Using the open-ended swab, I mimed the action and the doctor got the idea. He probed my ear with a light, and tried to extract the wad with the smallest pair of tweezers he had—a surgical clamp (you know, the kind that, so I’ve heard, makes a good roach clip). He shoved a roach clip down my ear canal! Needless to say, it didn’t work.
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He recommended me to Dr. ENT who works in a clinic in Besiktas, and wrote me a note with all the necessary information. A Turkish friend told me that the doctor’s note would be easily understood by any taxi driver, and that I should arrive in the morning so as to avoid a crowd and not have to wait a long time. So I followed her advice and slept in until 11:00. I didn’t want to take a taxi from my apartment all the way to the clinic (too expensive), and my friend had warned that the clinic was a top of a very steep hill, but if I took a bus all the way to Besiktas the taxi drivers wouldn’t take me because the trip was too short for them to make a decent fare.
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So I took a bus to Ortakoy, then walked half the way to Besiktas. It’s level, along the Bosphorous, and the weather outside wasn't frightful (doot-da-doot-doot-da-DOO-doot ). The taxi driver drove me right up to the building that I assumed housed the clinic. To do so, he made a sharp left turn from the middle lane of a busy, six-lane Boulevard (not an unusual tactic by Istanbul driving standards), cutting off a passenger car which had to brake suddenly and was immediately rammed from behind by another vehicle. Undaunted, my taxi driver continued his multi-lane U-turn, leaving behind the honking, swearing occupants of the vehicles damaged by this maneuver. We both understood his situation: he needed to get out of there, fast. I paid quickly, laughed as he sped away, and entered the building.
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After climbing two flights of stairs, I was told that I was in the wrong building, and I needed to go back outside and turn left at !@#$%^&* Street. Which I did. !@#$%^&* Street consisted of a stairway of 186 concrete steps. Once I reached the top, I faced even more climbing up a very steep street. But wait! There was a guard kiosk that protected an upper entrance to the same building I had just left. I could have taken an elevator! The guard looked at my note and started laughing. I was too winded to join in the jocular ribaldry. He pointed me back down the stairs to one building farther to the left. He was still laughing as I started down.
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Once I entered the correct building, I had to climb 36 more stairs to get to the clinic. So my morning step aerobics regimen included 222 ascending and descending stairs, all accomplished without breakfast and while half deaf. I checked in, hung up my hat and coat and waited for a seat to open. The place was packed, mostly with families of small children. Turks are very fecund. But why is there so much illness of the ears, noses and throats of the young, especially since they bundle the children up so tightly at the slightest hint of coolness? Today, the temperature was in the 40’s (F), yet anyone with a fur-lined hood had it tightly winched around their head, zipped parkas and ski gloves were everywhere. Maybe it’s because, oh, what the hell, I don’t care.
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Dr. ENT saw me after a mere 20 minute wait. The wad was out in seconds. He repeated the warnings of my parents, siblings, teachers and friends. I now have 20/20 hearing again. So, I have learned a valuable later-in-life lesson: when it comes to showers and cotton swabs -- no more showers!
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