Ear Infection Week

This week Jack has had an ear infection. Most people would agree with me that this is one of the worst ailments a person can experience. It's like having an ice-pick stuck into your head, it's excruciating and inescapable.

It started off on Sunday night after a swimming party with his friends. By Monday morning he was in so much pain that we kept him home from school and took him to the doctor for antibiotics and all that. He was up most of the night with the pain despite regular doses of calpol.

Jack spent most of Monday morning lying on the chair crying. The calpol that we'd given him hadn't made any difference and sadly with an ear infection there's not really much that can be done.

After seeing the doctor we were armed with antibiotics and permission to use a little bit more powerful pain relief. So we drugged him up and hoped for the best. The first antibiotics made him sick so we had to go get some other stuff, which made him less sick. By dinner time he'd been getting regular doses of a variety of medicines and had had enough. During the night the infection burst and a fluid started to leak from his ear. This is a good sign, sort of, it usually means that his ear drum has popped. But the infection drains and the pain goes away, it was the first step on the road to recovery.

Through Monday night didn't sleep much better than the night before. I stayed up with him this time and assured him that Id get him some more medicine as soon as I could. He moaned and groaned saying I don't want to be sick anymore, I just want to sleep, I... and then suddenly stopped and fell asleep.

In the morning Jack was much more like himself. My lectures weren't until the afternoon so he stayed home with me. We spent the morning watching TV and playing video games. At about 10am a pinkish green fluid dripped out of Jack's ear and onto his arm. It really grossed him out, you'd have sworn it was some kind of acid. I cleaned off his arm and his ear and Jack insisted that I find something to plug it with so to prevent something like this happening again, so I stuck a cotton ball in his ear. He also insisted that we have spare cotton balls, and an extra tissue. After an hour or so I noticed that the cotton ball was looking a little... green, so I decided that we'd replace it. I won't go into the details suffice to say that it was gross and colorful. Jack and I both were gagging at the sight and smell and we were glad when his ear was plugged again. Thankfully it got better pretty quickly, hourly changes became four hourly etc.

Wednesday he was back in school, still taking the antibiotics and still harbouring a cotton ball in his ear but otherwise he's all better. The only real problem now is that Jack is practically deaf with that cotton ball in his hear.