Although Deborah has been feeling better since she started to take antibiotics, she has lately been having a strange sensation in her ear, as if a bug had crawled up into it (I know, yuck). She actually did have an insect fly into her ear recently, just before she had put in ear plugs to help her sleep. Apparently the bug found the inner ear atmosphere a little too hot and stuffy with the ear plug blocking the exit and buzzed inside discontentedly until Deborah, sensing this, removed the ear plug and saw the little intruder fly out of her head. Not surprisingly, this freaked her out and she has since been hypersensitive to even the slightest sensation in her ear canal. She frequently insists I shine a flashlight into her ear to see if I can spot anything crawling around in there. So far I’ve observed nothing. It doesn’t help that Semoko just told us the story (or fable, more likely) of a man who had a centipede crawl into his ear and start to eat his brain. Yeah, thanks a lot Semoko; Deborah feels much better now.
Today we walked into town and stopped by to see Dr. Ishaque, who has replaced the eighty-year old and recently retired Dr. Joeli. Dr. Ishaque complemented Deborah on how clean her ears were, but joked that such cleanliness only makes them a more inviting target for wayward insects. Hairy ears with lots of wax make less appealing homes. But not to worry, there’s nothing crawling around in her head apart from paranoid thoughts of cranial infestation. She simply has some inflammation of her inner ear, which is tied to the other symptoms of her current illness. He instructed her to continue taking the antibiotics for another two days, and he gave her Prednisone and an antihistamine to take as well for the next several days. Deborah is very happy to know both that there are no insects in her head and that she isn’t completely delusional that something was going on in her ear. Still, she has informed me that she never again wants to live anywhere where there are this many insects.
A different kind of leaf bug than I showed in an earlier blog. Too big to fit in Deborah's ear though.
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