Superglue ear
I’m sure many of you will have heard of ‘glue ear’ which is the condition where fluid collects in the middle ear causing hearing loss and ear infections, but I had my second self-inflicted case recently where a patient had unfortunately mistaken his bottle of eardrops for a superglue bottle, and before he realised had squeezed a good amount of this glue into his ear! As we all know, most superglue manufacturers advertise their products as ‘bonds in seconds’ which is good when you are sticking objects together, but not when you suddenly panic as you realise that what you thought was wax removing eardrops was in fact superglue…
The end result of this incident was fortunately a happy one but not in the short term, as the glue set hard straight away and formed a solid plug in this gentleman’s ear canal. This caused excruciating pain whenever he moved his ear or his jaw as the skin of the ear canal was fixed in that position by the glue. Once he came to see me, we started irrigating the ear with Hydrogen Peroxide (a solution used, ironically, for earwax removal, but also as a mouthwash and skin antiseptic) which loosened the plug over a couple of hours to allow me to gently seperate the plug from the skin of his ear canal and tease it out under a short general anaesthetic that day. Luckily, the wax that he had been trying to get out in the first place had formed a barrier and prevented the glue from reaching the eardrum, thus preventing potentially much more damaging problems and need for reconstructive surgery if it had done so. As an added bonus, I removed the troublesome wax deep in the ear canal at the same time, once the glue plug was extracted!!
This labelling and packaging issue is something I really feel should be addressed. These bottles look remarkably similar, and have a ‘dropper’ type delivery system that is identical. The obvious solution is to keep these products well apart in the home, but in the busy lives we all lead these days, it is possible to become distracted while ‘multitasking’ and make this error.
People have made the same mistake with eyedrops, with I’m sure you can imagine sometimes horrific consequences…
Hopefully by reading this article, it will make you and your family aware of this issue, so you don’t become patient number 3 in my ‘superglue’ ear series…!
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