Wallace Lee was 66 and had spent half his life living with a constant ringing in his ears.
This former military helicopter mechanic in Weymouth, England, was convinced that two decades around aircraft engines, compounded by rugby injuries, had left him practically deaf. A doctor had already examined his ear, but accumulated wax concealed what was really going on inside. His wife Jeanette feared the worst.
Tired of finding no answers, Lee bought a home endoscope to look inside his own ear. There he found a white fragment: part of an earplug for flights that had become stuck five years earlier, during a trip to Australia. A surgeon removed it with tiny forceps, and his hearing returned immediately, as if it had never gone away.
