Can You Ear Me?
Guatemala - March 01, 2006
Midway through yesterday's trip, Eliseo stopped to show us a river and signaled for us to get out of the back. Seeing his excitement, I knew it would be smart to respond promptly. I had been enthralled by the audio book I was listening to and without thinking, yanked my headphones out of my ear with quite a bit of force. As soon as I pulled the ear buds out, I noticed that I was unable to hear out of my right ear. When I glanced down at my headphones, I noticed the gray bulbous soft-plastic tip was absent from the right headphone. I reached in with my pinky finger and my heart nearly stopped when I realized how far the tip was lodged in my inner ear... so far in that Patrick could not even see it. My first reaction was to try and pull it out with a pair of tweezers, but realized that might only worsen it. Eliseo quickly made the decision to take me to the nearest doctor he could find, and in five minutes we found one. However, this wasn't exactly the clinic I was expecting.
The small, dark, musty room contained a rusty examination table draped in old butcher paper. On the floor just under the archaic leg stirrups, several dried drops of blood were visible as remnants of a prior visit. When the doctor (who happened to be smoking), looked in my ear with his instrument I felt him push the earbud even farther into my ear canal. He, shook his head, pulled out a rudimentary chart of the ear canal and said "the sing is riiight here." It was about three-fourths of the way down my canal. The doctor looked at Eliseo and said (in Spanish) "I'm going to need you to hold him down." Then he pulled out an 8 inch pair of needlelike tweezers to rescue my earbud (and my hearing). I felt the cold tweezers slide down my canal and within a minute, could feel that he was pulling it out safely! Thankfully, everything turned out great. I won't mention what he charged us for 10 minutes of his time, but it would be safe to say that we were ripped off.
-Lee
Monie said...Yikes! So glad you could find a doc & could be helped. Whatever you paid, don't you think it was worth retaining your hearing?! :o)
Yawn said...Did you expect to be treated for free? You expect to be charged the same as a local? You loco white man.