Left Ear

Your left ear is making itself known. Perhaps as a dull pressure that will not ease. Perhaps as a stabbing pain, a whistling, a rushing, a creeping numbness, or the feeling of sitting behind a wall and only letting the world in through a filter. Medically, the list of possible causes is long — middle ear infections, pressure differences, sudden hearing loss, Eustachian tube dysfunction, degeneration, nerve irritation. Each of these diagnoses has its validity. Each deserves evaluation.

And yet there is a second question that often falls under the table when an ear goes to the doctor: Why the left one? Why not the right? Why the ear at all — that sense which cannot be controlled, which has no eyelids, no closure, which allows no looking away?