The night of 4th of July, after being around the neighbors' loud fireworks, I started having dizziness when laying down and moving around. I suspected it was ear-related, and might be due to impacted ear wax (have had enough wax buildup issues throughout the years to recognize the feeling.) 

I tried to do things the "right" way, brought it up with my PCP as I had an appointment coming up, they confirmed it was impacted earwax but the nurse wasn't available to perform irrigation. The receptionist couldn't get me in to address it for a couple weeks, which was while I'd be on vacation. I tried to get into an ENT that I've used in the past, but they were 2 months out for appointments. 

Since I wanted to get it addressed before vacation, I researched my options and settled on Debrox as a primary treatment and use of a Bebird to primarily monitor what's going on in there, with tool usage only when the wax was confidently safely away from my eardrum. This was about 3 weeks ago. 

I didn't take regular pictures throughout but wanted to share what I do have and share the result - There is what looks like inflamation/irritation now that it's clean, I'm guessing primarily due to using Debrox. 

My left ear was the worst by far, the right ear wasn't blocked up, but I did get a good chunk of hard/black wax on that side as well (last pic.)  The first pic is a day or 2 into my first round of Debrox (it was a fully sealed plug when I first looked at it.) The Debrox separated the wax from the canal on one side, massively improving my hearing and dizziness issue. After another day it opened up a larger hole in the center. At this point I attempted some light usage of the otoscope tools since I could see a little past the wax, but didn't have much success and wasn't going to try too hard and risk pushing the wax deeper. 

After the first 4-day round of Debrox I had a few small flakes come out with the rinse, but not much. The wax was a lot lighter at that point and clearly much softer than when it was a plug. This weekend I started another round of Debrox, and ordered a nicer irrigator for the end flush. It was supposed to show up this morning, but got delayed. I decided to give it another shot with the otoscope tools, and the 2nd round of softening made a HUGE difference. I was able to pull larger chunks out because they were finally releasing their grip on my ear canals. 

The result pic speaks for itself, and I'm completely and utterly relieved to have clean ears again! I'll be sure to monitor my ears periodically to address issues before it gets as bad as this did, glad I took the jump to take care of it instead of continuing to live with it. 

My first self-cleaning (Debrox + Bebird)