WEYMOUTH MAN HAD EARPLUG PIECE STUCK IN EAR FOR FIVE YEARS
A Dorset man blamed his fading hearing on old rugby injuries, but an earplug attachment had been lodged in his ear for about five years.
Wallace Lee, a Royal Navy veteran from Weymouth, Dorset, laid out the saga in a BBC interview published November 12, 2022.
“Five years ago when I was visiting my family in Australia I bought these little earplugs that you can put different attachments in, depending on the noise you want to phase out on an aircraft,” Lee said.
“One of these little attachments had lodged in there and it had been in there ever since,” he said.
Lee believed it got stuck during a plane journey on that family visit.
Years of foggy hearing
Lee noticed his hearing getting worse, and so did his wife. He chalked it up to his noisy aviation-industry career or old rugby injuries.
He tried several times to clear his ears without luck. Lee said he was at his “wit’s end.”
The New York Post reported that Lee was 66 and had worked 24 years near the noise of military helicopters. The paper also said the problem affected his balance and his golf game, and named his wife as Jeanette.
The pop
Lee finally bought a home endoscope kit and spotted a small white object in his ear.
He then went to an ear, nose and throat surgeon. The surgeon first tried suction, but hardened earwax kept the object from budging.
So the surgeon went in with miniature tweezers passed through a tube into the ear canal.
“I could actually feel him tugging, and all of a sudden it went pop,” Lee said. He said the surgeon was “amazed.”
“Instantly I could hear everything in the room. The fog that was in my head for all those years went and left – and I could hear perfectly well,” Lee said.
“It’s like hearing correctly for the first time all over again,” he said.
The BBC reported that Lee was “delighted” and called the removal an “instant relief.”
The BBC described the object as part of an earplug attachment. UPI and the Post called it part of an earbud.
Surgeon Neil De Zoysa said examining your own ears at home was unlikely to be too harmful. He urged people not to try removing foreign objects without professional medical help, warning it could cause infection or further difficulties.
