Hey, can you hear us now?!
A British man who feared he was going deaf used a home endoscope kit and discovered a piece of an earbud had been stuck in his ear for about five years.
Wallace Lee of Weymouth, Dorset, said he had been experiencing hearing loss for the past few years, and ended up buying a home endoscope kit to see if he could identify the issue. The tiny camera alerted him to a small white object inside his ear.
“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 told the BBC. “One of these little attachments had lodged in there and it had been in there ever since.”
Lee visited an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, who was able to remove the offending object.
“[The doctor] initially tried to suck it out… but 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 he got these miniature tweezers which they put down this other tube into the ear canal… I could actually feel him tugging, and all of a sudden it went pop. 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. It was just such a relief… it’s like hearing correctly for the first time all over again.”
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