Lend me your ear

It's like day 8 or 9 of my ear being all screwed up. I lost one of the teeny vinyl o-rings from a piece of jewelry I wear in the conch of that ear, so I put 2 and 2 together and decided that there must be a teeny vinyl foreign body in my ear causing the discomfort. I tried shaking my head around in the hopes of dislodging it, but nothing happened. I called my doctor's office and said that I was starting to think that the o-ring fell in there, and they referred me to an ear/nose/throat doctor. I saw him this afternoon.

The man was a caricature. He had the world's worst toupee and a lazy eye. He was tall and skeletal looking. He talked to me as if I were 3 years old and scared of visiting the doctor. I wanted to tell him to stop rambling and get to the point so I could get back to work. He spent 8000 words explaining that my ear is trying to heal and to leave it the hell alone. He took a framed color diagram of an ear, and used his fountain pen to draw on the glass to emphasize that there are dark spots on my ear drum. He said that if he showed a picture of my ear to an expert in [insert geographic location - he specified about 6 of them] that the expert would ask how it looked 3 days later, because that's about how long it will take to heal.

He said that there were popped blisters on my ear drum, from the infection of a week ago. There's no fluid there now, but my ear will continue to feel weird until the blisters heal completely. He put some cortisone cream on my ear drum, and expended another thousand or two words on telling me that I didn't need to have any additional antibiotics or anything.

So basically, I'm out another $20 co-pay, had to endure a doctor telling me in 30 minutes what he could tell me in one, and I have to stay at work an extra hour to make up the time. The up-side is that I don't have to waste any more creativity on imagining what's in my ear.