Glub.

A last-minute delivery kept me at work until almost 5:30 last night. So much for fitting a swim into the time between work and dinner.

But I've got book club on Wednesday, which is going to make a swim difficult to fit in, and so this was looking like another 1-swim week, and I was feeling excessively grumpy about that, so I packed up and went to the Y after the kids were in bed. It was actually kind of nice -- there weren't many people there, and since I didn't have to get home in time to cook dinner, I wasn't watching the clock, just counting my laps. (I'm up to 8 laps, 16 lengths -- that's half a mile! It's pretty slow, but at this point, my goal is movement, not speed.)

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I finally saw the ENT yesterday about my deaf ear. He peered into my ears and mouth, and threaded a scope up through my nose to look at my eustacian tube from the inside (and that's pretty much as comfortable as it sounds like) and told me that it looks like my sinuses are so swollen that they're blocking the eustacian tube entirely. Which means that in addition to retaining water, my inner ear can't pressurize properly, which means my eardrum isn't functioning the way it's supposed to, which means I can't hear. Whee.

He suspects the swelling is due to allergies, so he wrote me three prescriptions (a mild steroid to reduce the swelling, and an oral antihistamine and a nasal decongestant -- or maybe I've got those backwards -- to deal with the immediate symptoms and hopefully get my hearing back. (He said there's a 20-25% chance the meds won't do the trick, in which case I'll be getting a tube. Yay.)

And now I'm scheduled for not one, not two, but three appointments next week for allergy testing. (Correction - two are for testing, the third is the follow-up appointment to discuss the results and set up a course of treatment.) You know, 'cause I wasn't having to take enough time off from work already.