Now that's an earful!

An English man has just discovered why he's suffered from severe earache for the past few decades.

For more than 30 years Stephen Hirst was in constant pain and partially deaf because of excruciating earache.

But that is all in the past now after doctors found a TOOTH lodged in the former miner's ear.

Now, Stephen can sleep unhindered by the intense headaches that plagued him.

But medical staff remain mystified as to how the tooth came to be jammed in the 47-year-old's ear canal in the first place. Especially as he had all his teeth taken out some time ago.

He first complained of pain in his right ear when he was a teenager and was forced to attend countless hospital appointments in an attempt to discover the cause of his mystery condition.

'I've been plagued by earache since I was around 14,' he said.

'The pain wouldn't go away and I couldn't concentrate because it was always there. I used to use a lot of cotton wool and cotton buds and was prescribed antibiotics because I was always getting infections.

'I would be screaming in pain, that's not exaggerating. It was a sharp jabbing pain and it just wouldn't go away. I've lost count of the times I have been examined but no one spotted the tooth.

'I went again and again to the ear, nose and throat clinic. I don't know why but they never came across the tooth. I decided to have one last try to sort it out and I booked an appointment at the Royal Hallamshire [Hospital] in Sheffield.

'They were determined to get to the bottom of the problem. The nurse put a suction tube in my ear and cleaned it thoroughly, then she had a go with a microscope probe and finally she used some tweezers and got it out.

'She didn't say anything at first, she just stood there looking amazed. Then she said to me: 'Have you lost any teeth lately?' I said I'd not had any teeth in my head for years.

'The nurse said she couldn't believe what she had found in my ear and showed me the tooth. She said in 20 years she's never seen anything like it.

'I would think it's a first tooth, looking at it, because it can't be big enough to be an adult tooth. I think it's a bottom tooth, one of the front incisors.'

He said he was baffled to how it got there but the most likely explanation was 'that I pushed it in when I was a kid or something.'

But he speculated: 'At school one day I was swinging between two desks.

'I fell and smashed the back of my ear. It might have happened then.'

Mr Hirst said he would be keeping the tooth as a souvenir.

There's more at the link, including photographs.

I'm baffled. How a tooth gets from the mouth, through solid flesh and bone, into the structures of the ear . . . it doesn't seem medically possible, although clearly, in this case, it was! Certainly an unique explanation for his earache, and one that should form the basis for some learned medical dissertations in years to come.

Peter