11-Year-Old Boy Deaf for Nine Years Is Suddenly Cured

An 11-year-old boy from Britain, who was deaf for nearly 10 years, was suddenly cured when a thick piece of cotton popped out of his ear, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

Jerome Bartens was diagnosed as deaf in his right ear when he was just two-years-old.

Over the next nine years, he struggled to live a normal life as a young boy — but everything changed when he felt a sudden pop in his right ear while playing a game of pool with friends.

He put his finger in his ear and pulled out a tip of a cotton wool bud that had been wedged in his ear since he was a toddler.

"It was just incredible — his hearing returned to normal in an instant," Barten's dad said.

"I had always suspected Jerome had stuck something in his ear when he was little and that was causing the problem. But the doctors and hearing specialists said it was wax and he would probably grow out of it."

You don’t outgrow popcycle sticks either

You keep referencing these "popcycle" things..
I've never heard of one. Apparently it's a kind of moped.

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I copied practically everybody who’d posted on the thread because I think it’s really important for people who are fighting socialized medicine in the US to have a good arsenal of examples. Tilly is one of the most appalling examples, since the 7+ years she and her family spent dealing with this awful situation was not the result of the usual culprits — i.e. lack of resources, rationing, waiting lists, etc — but just the result of nobody in the entire NHS system having any motivation to find a solution.

That’s what’s wrong with removing personal profit from the system. Everybody is busy “doing their jobs”, but nobody is focused on trying to do better than others so standards drop through the floor. Tilly’s special feeding system and related medical attention obviously cost the system a good deal of money, but nobody in the system would have earned a penny more by finding the right answer, even though in this case that clearly would have saved the system considerable money.

IIRC, I read this in the mid 1990s...I’m pretty sure it’s pre-net. BUT maybe some UK posters will see the story and recognize it, and they may know where more info can be found-I HAVE to believe a woman wrongly confined to a wheel chair for a decade or more had to get a lot of attention!

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