How It All Began
Starting when she was an infant, Lydia had many ear infections. She was at the doctor constantly, and had tubes put in both ears multiple times as a young child.
When she was 18 months old, she woke up one day with a significant amount of mucus coming out of her left ear. Her mother took her to the pediatrician, who found that the mucus had corroded her left eardrum and sent her to an ENT. The ENT confirmed that her eardrum was damaged and that she did, in fact, have hearing loss in her left ear.
When she was in kindergarten – at age five – she had surgery where the ENT tried to rebuild her left eardrum with a “fat patch,” where they took a piece of fat from her neck and used it to fill her eardrum, plus the ENT put in a prosthetic bone. This solution worked well for a while, but then she had a cyst grow in her left ear, which the ENT removed. Her ENT told her family that when a cyst like that grows, there’s a 20% chance it will grow back.