Make hay while the sun shines...

I love Peds acute care -- you never know what you're going to get (to borrow a phrase from Forest Gump).

There was an adolescent female in the room with her mother. Her ear had been feeling full and her hearing wasn't so good from that ear. With frustration, the mother and daughter mentioned that they had been seen 2-3 times now and it wasn't getting better. One diagnosis offered was swimmer's ear. The funny thing was that she had not been swimming. I asked her what she had been doing. Well, it was summer in Wisconsin and like many farm hands, she had been making hay all summer. I looked in the ear and saw something I had never seen before: it looks white and black and cottony. I got a sample and sent it to the lab, but I thought I knew what she had and gave her a prescription.

When we called her a couple of days later, she was feeling much better and almost back to normal. The lab studies confirmed the diagnosis: Aspergillus niger.

She had fungus growing in her ear. How might this have happened? During my exam, I noted that her hair was damp and there were pieces of hay stuck in. The damp, golden curls hung over the ear. I'm guessing the warm, damp weather of summer, the fungus in the hay she was making and the environment in her auditory canal probably created the "perfect storm" for the infection. Onychomycosis -- my first.