They Cut Into My Eardrum While I Was Awake. Nobody Ever Asked What That Did to My Brain.

Here's something you don't hear everyday. I had a surgical procedure while I was awake at 10 years old. I am not being dramatic, it is a real part of my history and it was as barbaric as it sounds.

The surroundings are blurry, I know my dad is there next to me but trying to drop into that moment in time I always end up hovering above it instead. In fact, I can see my uncle in the waiting room, it has a green tint to it and there are two elderly ladies sitting to his left. The room was small and I was above them. Whether that is just how my tiny traumatized mind absorbed it, or if I really left my body, I will never know. I just know what I remember.

But if there ever was a case for an out-of-body experience this would be it. The room I was in was cold and sterile. That putrid green color spilled into her office too. Tissue paper crinkled and stuck to my right cheek creating no comfort against the hard vinyl table where I lay, helpless and terrified. She assured me that it would only pinch a little bit while she sprayed a topical anesthetic into my ear canal.

That was a lie. The ear infection went deep and was resistant to any effects a numbing spray might have. Then she went in, making an incision into my eardrum, the tympanic membrane, and suctioned the fluid out through the opening. What I relive, at just the thought of this experience, is that sound. The idea of that noise creating a pain like no other, makes me tense as I sit and write this.

I vividly remember my uncle telling me later in my life that he could hear me screaming from the waiting room. Maybe that is just what they did in the 80s, but it seems like a pretty drastic step to take on a small child. We were on a trip to Florida and I wouldn't be able to fly home with an active ear infection. I guess no other options were on the table, so torture was the only way through. It was certainly a vacation I will never forget.

So why am I telling you this? Because I started thinking about that day, and then about all the other ear infections I had as a child, and the two other surgeries I had while asleep to deal with my chronic infections, and some dots started to appear. So I did a little digging. And I have a feeling that if you're reading this, you have a history with dots of your own that nobody ever connected either.

Let me start with a question I can't answer. As a child I had chronic ear infections. Or did I? Some of them were definitely infections. The Disney World house of horrors I just described was absolutely a real one, I watched the pus come out of my head, so there's no debating that one.

But I do wonder if they were all infections. Because here's what I know now, that I couldn't have known then: the onset of a migraine for me today involves a tightening inside my ear, sometimes with a little pain. When you're little, you have no language for "tightening" or "mild pressure." You just know your ear hurts. So you say ear, and an adult says infection, and that becomes the story.

When I went looking, I found I'm not the only one who's wondered this. There's research suggesting that the nerves serving the ear can refer pain that feels exactly like an infection when there isn't one there at all. I can't tell you that's what was happening to me as a kid. There's no way to know now. But I can't stop wondering whether some of those early "infections" were actually my nervous system speaking a language nobody in that room could read yet, including me.

Here's my second question and something I keep coming back to. Forget whether they were all infections. What if the infections themselves, real ones, plus the surgeries, plus years of inflammation and irritation in that exact spot, did something more permanent?

What if all that inflammation slowly lowered my body’s threshold, meaning the migraines I'd develop later on had a shorter fuse than they otherwise might have? I'd love to find solid research on this and maybe I just haven't found the right papers yet. But I find it fascinating to sit with, because if where the cascade started matters, then maybe healing isn't only about chasing today's symptoms. Maybe it's about going all the way back to the root of all roots.

I want to be clear that I'm working this out alongside you, not lecturing you. My mind races faster than my fingers can type when I get into this, which is usually how I know I might be onto something. But a hunch is a hunch, and I'd never dress one up as a fact.

There's one more piece of this I think about. The procedure I had while awake is called a myringotomy, the incision into the eardrum. Often a tiny tube gets placed through that opening to keep the ear ventilated, which is the "tubes in the ears" surgery you've probably heard of. It was extremely common back then, considered standard for kids with chronic infections. The guidelines have tightened considerably since the 80’s, leaning toward watching and waiting before going in surgically. But that wasn't the era I grew up in.

And here's a fun fact, or maybe not so fun. No doctor in my life since has ever looked in my ears without saying “WOW” and then asking if I have hearing problems. I do. There's so much scar tissue in there that it's hard to even see my eardrum. So permanent damage, minor but real, was certainly done that day.

Read an excerpt from my upcoming book Sick of Being Sick:
The Morning Migraine Audit.

And then I wonder some more. If instruments were cutting and scarring tissue right at a nerve pathway that we know is involved in migraine, is it crazy to ask whether that left a mark on more than just my eardrum or canal? I genuinely don't know. It's just a question I can't put down.

I'll say one thing plainly before I go further, because I never want this work to do harm. If you have new or changing ear pain, or head pain, please don't decide on your own that it's "just migraine." Get it looked at. Rule out what needs ruling out. My wondering is about the past, about dots that have already been connected wrong for decades, not a reason to skip care today.

Because here's where all of this actually lands, and it isn't really about ears at all.

You have a history like mine. Maybe not this specific. Maybe not this dramatic. But layered and complicated and full of moments that quietly shaped the body you're living in right now. The chronic ear infections nobody connected to migraine. The surgeries nobody connected to a sensitized nervous system. The childhood nobody connected to the body that is still, all these years later, trying to recover.

We can't go back. I can't undo what happened on that table when I was ten. You can’t go back and undo your past. We can't unmake the scar tissue, literal or metaphorical. We can't go back and ask better questions.

But we can start asking them now. And we can start with yours.

Amanda Richardson, BCDFN, CFNC is a Board Certified Doctor of Functional Nutrition, researcher, and publisher of Migraine Unread. She lives with hemiplegic migraine and has made it her mission to connect the dots that conventional medicine never thought to connect. Her upcoming book Sick of Being Sick is set to be released early 2027. Work with Amanda at AmandaRichardson.co.