ear infections

How well is your diabetes in control? Do you have an A1c of 6.0ish or under? An ear infection is like any other infection, in that diabetics are more prone to get them, and once we have them, they can be bears to get healed up. The more in control your diabetes is, the more your body will handle infections as if it were non-diabetic.

Ear infections *hurt*, and they can destroy hearing. Scary stuff.

It took a certain Dr almost 2 Years to notice and confirm that my noisy ear had a burst ear drum and the eustation tubes in both ears are always full to overflowing causing a lot of problems... I do see a Consultant in ENT but I call him Dr no can do because he doesn't ever do anything for my ears, not even gromits for the eustation tubes. The noisey ear has constant ringing in it which I now know is caused by the burst ear drum and it is pretty bad, loud and constant.If my ENT consultant had to live with this personally it would be a very different story now wouldn't it??>

You need a new doctor, hon. This one is a horse doctor. I'm just sayin'. This is *serious* and needs aggressive treatment, not this benign neglect your doctor is passing off as medical care.

Do you suffer from allergies, with post-nasal drip, etc? If so, you need a really good allergy doc, a course of allergy shots, and proper allergy meds, and that will all help beat that problem back. I suspect you may have one-thing-feeds-the-other going on-- diabetes, allergies, a stubborn bug or two, maybe a chronic fungal infection too.

One thing you can try is keeping your ears dry-- wear protective ear plugs in the shower or while swimming, and then use whatever your doctor recommends for prevention purposes a couple times a day (saline? not sure what it'd be, but maybe something with a steroid in it to help with the inflammation, and/or an anti-fungal ear med).

Whatever's giving you those repeated infections thrives on 3 things: dark, damp and warm, so... just keeping it dry in there will go a long way in prevention.

Ask your doc too about having some lab tests done to see what kind of bacteria and/or fungus you're fighting. Without lab specimens, the doc will just continue throwing antibiotics at it willy-nilly, and it sounds as if you've done all the usual things and are getting nowhere.I'd start getting insistent and loud, if I were you. Enough is enough!
Good luck, and please let us know how you're doing, okay?

Posted by: "BK"