耳が痛い!!! (My Ear Hurts!!!)

When I was a young child I had a slight hearing problem. To fix it, doctors removed the adnoids in my nasal cavity and made me wear hearing tubes for about eight years. The upside? I do not snore, except in the rare case that my nostrils get ridiculously blocked. Downside? When my nasal area gets blocked like that, the fluid build-up makes me mad susceptible to ear infections.

Now normally, back home in the States, I’d buy some Sudafed over the counter, take it regularly for about three or four days and case closed. In Japan, though? ちょっと違うよ。Things are a bit different. Here in the land of temperamental weather and crazy sick masks, Sudafed is illegal because it contains epinephrine, a stimulant. Epinephrine is illegal but you can buy what is basically speed at a combini… Go figure.

Anyway, this puts me in a sticky situation because since I can’t really take any preventative measures or properly self-medicate, I am left waiting for the monster incubating in my inner-ear to hatch like an Alien baby and deliver a mighty painful dose of reality in the middle of the night. Take for instance last September. I had only been in Japan for about a month before I got the summer sniffles. I don’t like to take medicine because I like for my white blood cells to train themselves for war every now and again… let me just say, they go down mighty quickly to that inner ear infection. Needless to say, with almost no warning whatsoever (after many years of dealing with this problem, I can feel an infection coming about 3 days before a doctor can even see it on the monitor =/) I am brutally awakened by what feels like someone repeatedly stabbing me in my ear with a knife. Yay.

With no Sudafed I was left writhing in pain and the only things I could immediately think to do were to call my mother in the middle of her workday, and cry. Simultaneously. I searched online for home remedies but I think at that point all I had in my house was a loaf of bread and a carton of milk so many tips were utterly useless. All I found was some advice to chew gum with Xylitol in it, amazingly that stuff is everywhere in this country. Eventually I just resorted to dripping hot water down my ear canal, hoping it would break up that pressure.

As I waited… and cried, I kept thinking one thing- well, two things actually: it sucks to be contractually forbidden from owning a car or scooter; and WHY ON EARTH IS SUDAFED BANNED?!!?!

When I woke up the next morning after somehow being able to fall back to sleep I thought: man, this might happen a lot here… And here we are, starting round two. Tomorrow, I gets drugs; if I can make it through the night because I definitely can’t drive to a hospital at 3am!

My failed arsenal of weapons. =/