A few months after the school year started at my boarding school, I had an ear problem. One night I noticed a buzzing of some sort in my left ear when I went to sleep. It had been hurting for a while whenever I was talking, running, wrestling, and even sleeping, but I mostly ignored it. That night the noise in my ear got annoying.
The next morning I had to go to a clinic to get a skin condition checked out so I'd be allowed to wrestle in a school tournament that afternoon. Before every tournament, you weigh in and then you go over to a guy who checks out your skin. At a tournament a couple of days earlier, the officials told me I couldn't wrestle because they thought I had some kind of rash. When I went to the waiting room at the doctor's office, I saw a poster about ear infections tacked up on the wall. It said some ear problems start with buzzing in the ear, and then the ear gets swollen to the point where the ear drum inflates. According to the poster, eventually, this could cause deafness.
I got worried.
