Like a close call with a shark, like a date with a skin specialist or a fin up the arse from an out-of-control longboarder, Surfer’s Ear is one of those hazards that can strike fear into a surfer’s mind at a mere mention, but for many of us, it’s something we’ve neither experienced or know much about. Sure, we’ve all heard it’s got something to do with bone growing in your ear, that it’s excruciatingly unpleasant and requires a doctor’s drill to be sorted out, but what’re the finer details of this strange affliction and how likely is it to set up shop in the cosy confines of your ear canal?
Damien ‘Dummo’ Boscheinen is a man who knows a thing or two about Surfer’s Ear. At forty-five, the sharp-witted South Coast native has already had to undergo the drill twice.
‘It felt like some prick was shoving a loaf of bread in me ears,’ he says of the last time the condition started to wreak havoc on his headspace. ‘You can’t hear, surfing becomes unpleasant, you’re consistently getting infections … It’s not an intense pain, it’s more of a slow, grinding pain. It just grinds your whole psyche.’
With a lifetime of surfing in the cool waters and blustery winds that characterise the coastline south of Sydney, Dummo was a perfect candidate to develop Surfer’s Ear. Known medically as Exostoses, it’s essentially the growth of new bone in your ear canal thanks to long-term exposure to cold winds and water. And it’s a slow-developing condition, usually taking decades for the canal to narrow to a point where water, wax and all the other shit that moves in and out of your ear can become trapped and start to cause symptoms like loss of hearing, pain, infections, and tinnitus. Which basically means you could be on the way to having it and not even know it.
But does that mean we should all start dreading the inevitable whir of a drill boring into our skulls?
‘Just about everyone I look into who surfs has got exostoses, but often they’re not causing any problems and you don’t have to do anything about them,’ says ear, nose and throat specialist Dr Jason Roth, who runs a practice at Dee Why on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. ‘It’s only in the very late stages when water starts to get trapped, or the little bits of skin and wax that we all normally make can’t get out of the ear canal and blocks it completely, that you really need to do something.’
So how common is the problem, how many surfers’ ears has Jason sunk his drill into?
‘I do probably two or three a month,’ he says. ‘It’s quite a common problem. Some of the older surgeons in the area, who are in their seventies now, it’s been a huge part of their practice.’
But as Jason and Dummo both suggest, the operation is much less of a worry than the symptoms that precede it.
‘Usually surfers want to get this surgery done because they’re just starting to find that every time they go in the water, they get water trapping and then they get a sore ear and it starts discharging pus,’ says Jason. ‘It just becomes a real hassle for them.’
‘I hadn’t heard out of my right ear for two years,’ agrees Dummo. ‘It was such a relief.’
So what about prevention, what if after all this delightful talk of discharged pus and ruined mental states you’re still not convinced Surfer’s Ear is the condition for you?
‘You can wear ear plugs,’ says Jason. ‘Wearing ear plugs does stop it—it won’t reverse any growth that’s already been done, but it stops them growing. A lot of surfers just use blu-tack, because it’s cheap and actually forms a pretty good mould, so it’s reasonably effective.’
But if you’re not willing to block out the whole world and compromise your balance every time you step into the soup, Jason suggests the frequent use of alcohol-based drops like Aqua Ear combined with hydrogen peroxide-based wax solvents like Ear Clear or WaxSol will do a pretty good job of at least delaying the time until symptoms start to arrive.
And if that still doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, you could always drop everything and move somewhere warm, like Indo, because as Jason points out, ‘The colder it gets, the more likely you are to get it.’
SurfEars – Tom Carroll from SurfEars on Vimeo.
