I asked him about his ear because I had been meaning to ask for days, and then I kept not doing it.
It was one of those small health things that is not small if you are the one living with it. He had been saying his ear was ringing since he fell out of a chair and hit his head months ago. Not a dramatic fall in the way people imagine when they hear “head injury,” but enough that he remembered it clearly and enough that the ringing stayed.
I didn’t want to make it into a scary conversation, but I also didn’t want to do the thing adults do where we act casual because we don’t know what to do next. So I asked, “Is it still ringing?”
He said yes.
I asked if it was both ears or one. He said the specialist said it was mostly one ear. That part actually made me feel a little better and worse at the same time. Better because at least someone had looked at it. Worse because someone had looked at it and it was still just sitting there in his day like a tiny broken alarm.
He told me they did a hearing test. I asked if there was supposed to be a follow-up. He said someone was trying to set one up, but it hadn’t happened yet. That sentence has become so normal in my life that I almost didn’t react to it. A follow-up exists somewhere in the future. A phone call needs to be made. A schedule needs to line up. Someone has to remember during business hours. Meanwhile the kid just has ringing in his ear.
I asked about cleaning his ears, which immediately made me feel like I was reaching for the most basic possible answer because I had no better one. He said mostly water gets in there when he showers. That was about it. I said maybe we should be more careful about that, not jamming anything in, not doing anything weird, just making sure it isn’t a wax thing on top of whatever else is going on. I could hear myself trying to sound useful.
Then I asked about headphones.
That one hit a little closer. He listens to stuff loud sometimes. Music, videos, whatever he is doing when he is trying to disappear into his own world for a while. I get it. I do the same thing, just with worse posture and older ears. But I told him loud headphones probably weren’t helping. I didn’t say it like a lecture, or at least I hope I didn’t. I just said if one ear is already irritated or damaged or whatever is happening, blasting sound into it is probably not the move.
I told him about how my ears started ringing after I got sick. Not all the time, but enough that I notice it when the room gets quiet. Sometimes it’s this thin little tone that shows up out of nowhere, like an old TV left on in another room. I told him that not because I think my thing is the same as his, but because I didn’t want him to feel like he was describing something unreal. Ear ringing is weird. You can’t point to it. Nobody else can hear it. It makes you sound like you are complaining about a ghost.
The part I hated saying was that there may not be a magic fix for the ringing itself. I’m not a doctor, and I didn’t pretend to be one. I just said from what I know, sometimes with tinnitus the main thing is protecting your ears from making it worse and following up when you can. That felt very unsatisfying. It still does.
We talked about foam earplugs. Cheap ones. The kind you can get in a pack and keep around for loud places. I said they might help if there’s noise around the house or if he’s somewhere loud and can’t leave. Not as a cure, just as a little barrier. A tiny bit of control, maybe.
None of it felt like enough. Clean your ears carefully. Turn down the headphones. Maybe use earplugs. Wait for the appointment. That was the whole toolkit sitting on the table, and it looked pretty small.
Before I left, I told him I was heading out for a bit. I reminded him there was food downstairs. I said it in that ordinary way, like the conversation had been ordinary too, even though I was still thinking about his ear and the fall and the follow-up that hadn’t happened yet.
Then I signed off with love, because sometimes that is the only part I can do without needing a referral or a copay or the right phone number.
