I guess they just need a good flushing out sometimes; I'm wondering if I might need that as well, maybe get another couple K out of it on the up swing
Well, I'll tell the more or less whole story just in case someone else is in the same boat:
When I was 12 or so, I'd occasionally get a "full" feeling in at least one ear. It's so long ago now that I can't even remember if it was one ear or both, just that it was an annoying feeling that would come and go. I don't think it actually affected my hearing. I asked my parents to take me to the doctor, but it never happened.
At some point in my thirties it started happening again and since I was by then a big boy and could take myself places, I had a doctor check it out and was told it was just allergies. In fact, for a long time pretty much everything that sent me to a doctor wound up being diagnosed as allergies, so after a while I just kinda gave up on bothering (I'm fortunate in that my health is generally good and I have the luxury of ignoring it).
This time out, the problem was limited to my left ear but would come and go. Some days I wouldn't notice it at all, other days that ear would be almost completely deaf. But it seemed to get much worse while lying down in bed, so again I just figured it was allergies and hoped it would subside.
At times it was also much worse after showering, which in hindsight was a pretty big clue.
Anyway, I recently had to consult a periodontist, who lectured me about my doctor avoidance. I'd managed to keep away for so long that it had, frankly, become phobic, but that's another story. Between the lecture and the fact that I really didn't want to lose my multichannel hearing, I finally made an appointment and had someone peer in there. They found...stuff. I still don't know why lying down made it worse, but apparently the post-shower issue was because the architecture caused water to get trapped behind the blockage and unable to get out.
But here's the happy ending: They made a follow-up appointment for the next week and sent me home with a piece of paper telling me to put mineral oil in the affected ear twice a day and leave it there for a few minutes. It made the deafness even worse and more consistent at first, but after the third day I used a bulb-type ear syringe I'd had forever to squirt some warm water in there and...well, some of you might be eating, so I'll just say that it...produced results.
Yesterday I went back to have the pro take a whack. She looked in there and said there was still trouble, so she got to work. It was painless, not even uncomfortable and very, very low-tech: She had a special kind of syringe which she simply filled with warm water, squirted in there a few times, looked again through the otoscope and repeated until everything was gone.
On the way home, I stopped at the pharmacy and found exactly the same kind of syringe and bought one...because, after exiting the office, I realized that I could now hear slightly better out of my left ear than my right! I figure I'll just do the same process myself at home.