For about four months, a 36-year-old woman lived with pain, drainage, and a blocked feeling in her right ear, and her hearing kept getting worse. She was evaluated several times and took multiple courses of antibiotics. Her symptoms only worsened.
The cause turned out to be tuberculosis, the bacterial infection best known for attacking the lungs. Doctors eventually found it in her middle ear and mastoid bone, and in her lungs. After a year of treatment, her hearing was fully restored.
