Wallace Lee told the BBC that he was convinced he was losing his hearing until he discovered the cause of his suffering. A British man who thought he was almost deaf discovered that he had an earplug stuck in his ear. The plastic object had been “living” there for five years.
Wallace Lee, a resident of the town of Weymouth in Dorset, England, had always believed that his hearing problems were related to his work in the very noisy aviation industry or to old rugby injuries. But at some point he decided to buy a home endoscope, and with it he discovered a small white object in his ear. Wallace went to the doctor. According to him, he felt a great relief when the doctor removed a piece of plastic from his ear.
Wallace was able to find a piece of a headphone using a home endoscope. Wallace Lee, a veteran of the British Royal Navy, believes that an object got stuck in his ear during a long flight in an airplane. “Five years ago, when I was visiting my family in Australia, I bought these little earplugs that you can put different attachments on,” he said. “And this is one of those attachments that got stuck there.” Since then, he has noticed a deterioration in his hearing and began to worry that he would soon go completely deaf.
Wallace Lee said he “immediately felt relief” when the small white object was finally extracted. Wallace said he had tried several times over the years to clean his ears thoroughly, but to no avail. He began to “go crazy. The ENT doctor who removed the plastic torturer was also a bit “shocked”. “At first the doctor tried to suck it out…but because the fragment had been there for so long, the earwax hardened around it and it wouldn’t move at all,” Wallace said. “Then he took out one of those miniature tweezers that goes into the tube and put it into the ear canal. I could literally feel him pulling, and then there was a sharp snap.” “I immediately began to hear everything around me. The fog that had been in my head all these years lifted and I was able to hear everything perfectly. “It was such an incredible relief…as if I had regained my hearing!”
ENT surgeon Neil De Zoysa said in an interview with the BBC that home ear exams are a relatively safe procedure, but he advises against trying to remove foreign objects yourself because it can lead to infection and new problems. In such cases, he said, professional medical help is needed.