I have waved the flag of surrender at my ears and sinuses and went to an ENT specialist yesterday. I knew I was in trouble when he stuck a mirror into my throat and said, “My goodness, is your right tonsil always this large?” Ummm, is that bad?

He looked in my ears and said, “You use Q-tips on your ears, don’t you?”

“Well, sure, isn’t that what God made Q-tips for?”

“Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ‘Don’t put anything larger than your elbow into your ear’?”

“I don’t think my elbow is going to get my ear very clean.”

“Your ears are self-cleaning. You just wipe the outside of them with a towel. Those Q-tips are like a ramrod pounding everything against your eardrum. We’re going to have to clean out your ears.”

“I’ve been told that before!”

While he went to get some instruments, I surreptitiously tried to put my elbow in my ear and concluded I’d have to be a contortionist or a master of yoga to perform such an act.

The he made me lie down so he could clean out my ears and I immediately swore off Q-tips forever. Tears came to my eyes as I promised to go home and burn every cotton swab in my house. I believe I was howling, Sweet Caesar, I swear I’ll never use a Q-tip again as long as you STOP WITH THE SCRAPING!

He said, “This is pretty disgusting stuff. I won’t show you what I’m taking out of your ears.” Which proved that he didn’t know me at all, because unless he pulled a worm out of my ear I wanted to see what it was. Besides, if he had scooped an eardrum out with all that scraping I wanted him to put it back immediately. And man oh man. There was Q-tip debris in there. And other stuff.

So I’m serving as a terrible warning to you. Don’t Q-tip yourself. Just don’t.

After this, we did a hearing test and I could hear everything from the angels singing to the song of the whales in the depths of the ocean. I have completely normal hearing. Which proves that the problem really is Joe mumbling, after all.

Then it was on to the sinuses. Along with a new course of antibiotics, the doctor wants me to start rinsing my sinuses. That sounded just fine until he started mentioning neti pots and the practice of yoga masters (yogis? yogists?), and I had to stop and say, mister, if it requires yoga I guarantee you I am not going to be able to do this; how clean do these sinuses really need to be, anyway?

He callously brushed off my concerns. You’ll get used to it, he insisted. So here’s what I have to do everyday. I lean over the sink with a squirt bottle of warm saline water, and when I squirt it up through one nostril, it rinses the sinuses, races directly through my frontal lobe and then flows out the other nostril. Auuuugggghhh. Somehow this is good for me.