MAN THOUGHT HE WAS GOING DEAF, BUT AN EARPLUG WAS STUCK

A Royal Navy veteran from Weymouth, Dorset, who feared he was going deaf found out that a piece of an earplug had been stuck in his ear for about five years. Wallace Lee blamed his fading hearing on a noisy aviation career and old rugby injuries, but he believes the real culprit got lodged in his ear during a flight on a visit to family in Australia.

Lee told the BBC in an interview published November 12, 2022, that he had picked up a set of earplugs on that trip. They came with interchangeable attachments, depending on how much aircraft noise you wanted to block out.

“One of these little attachments had lodged in there and it had been in there ever since,” he said.

He did not know it at the time. “I had no idea it had been lodged there,” he told Bournemouth News & Picture Service, as quoted by the New York Post. “I hadn’t utilized one of those earbuds for five years.”

Instead, he and his wife noticed his hearing getting worse. The Post reported that Lee was 66, a former naval engineer who had spent 24 years working near the noise of military helicopters, so he had a perfectly reasonable explanation ready. The paper also said the problem hurt his balance and his golf game, and named his wife as Jeanette.

Lee tried to clear his ears several times over the years and got nowhere. He told the BBC he was at his “wit’s end.”

A home endoscope and a pop

The breakthrough came when Lee bought a home endoscope kit. Peering into his own ear, he spotted a small white object that had no business being there.

The Post reported that his doctor could not get the object out, and that he then sought out an ear, nose and throat specialist at a hospital near his home. The Post described the fragment as plastic and said it appeared to come from a noise-canceling earplug.

The ENT surgeon, Neil De Zoysa, first tried to suck it out. That went nowhere. “Because it had been in there that long with the build up of the hard ear wax, it wouldn’t move at all,” Lee said.

So the surgeon switched to miniature tweezers, passed down a tube into the ear canal. “I could actually feel him tugging, and all of a sudden it went pop,” Lee said. He added that the surgeon was “amazed.”

The effect was immediate. “Instantly I could hear everything in the room,” Lee said. “The fog that was in my head for all those years went and left – and I could hear perfectly well.”

“It’s like hearing correctly for the first time all over again,” he said.

The BBC reported that Lee was “delighted” and described the removal as an “instant relief.” The BBC called the object part of an earbud, though Lee described an earplug attachment, and UPI and the Post also called it part of an earbud.

De Zoysa told the BBC that looking at your own ears at home was unlikely to do much harm. He urged people not to try pulling out foreign objects without professional medical help, since doing so could lead to infection or more trouble later.

Lee, for his part, could hear the room properly for the first time in about five years.