It’s genuinely such a relief to get your ear cleaned out when it gets all plugged up, undoubtedly more so when it’s hurting. I once had something similar happen somehow, just without as much of the pain. It started getting harder to hear out of one of my ears, and although I tried to rinse it out, it didn’t seem to help and I didn’t want to fucking pierce my ear drum trying something stupid. I held off but it finally got to the point that not only was I having trouble hearing out of the ear, my balance was being impacted.

I had started to notice I felt kinda wobbly, and so I was finally like fuck it, doctor time. Go to doctor, nice lady does like the doc in the OP poking a camera in, then has some other guy come in and he’s like, “You’ll wanna tilt your head to the side for this,” as he holds a small bucket to the side, below my head. Gets basically a spraybottle with some special ear-nozzle or whatever, squirts a warm stream of some solution (think it was carbamide peroxide) into my ear and dislodges this big ol’ glob of earwax that had inexplicably managed to build up in my ear despite me not wearing earbuds/headphones often.

I glanced at that poor little bucket now full of this nasty ass archipelago of earwax and felt fuckin’ great. Cost me a bit, but the doc saved me for the future telling me about some off the shelf stuff to help avoid a return visit.

If you’ve never had this done before but have been congested, and briefly cleared your nostrils with a good blowing of your nose or something, it’s like that but so much better because your ears getting plugged up sucks so much more.