People always told Calvin Wright he spoke too loudly.
Now he knows why.
For 41 years, the Athens man had a pearl from his mother's necklace stuck in his ear canal. ER staff at St. Mary's Hospital discovered it when Wright came in suffering from bronchitis this month.
"The nurse was checking my ear and said, ‘Do you use Q-Tips?'" Wright said. "I said yes, and she said, ‘you've got one in your right ear, I'll get it out.' She tried getting it and then she was like, ‘Whoa, this is hard. This is not a Q-Tip. Looks like you got a pearl in your ear.'"
Nurse practitioner Christina Harrelson and nurse Haley Faulkner referred Wright to a specialist. Dr. James Dempsey removed the pearl, which Wright kept.
It all started when Wright was 5, and he and his younger sister, Regina, got hold of their mother's necklace.
"My mom was at work and the babysitter was watching us," Wright recalled of the childhood incident in Chicago. "My sister broke the necklace, and the pearls went everywhere."
Playing around, Regina apparently shoved two pearls in his ear. Wright was in pain when his mother came home. They went to the hospital.
"I was hollering so bad, then the doctor said, ‘I got it out,'" Wright said. "I remember I got two green lollipops. I didn't think more about it."
When the second pearl was discovered, doctors asked Wright if he had suffered headaches, sinus problems or other symptoms. But the only effect was he struggled to hear himself speak.
"Everybody would say, ‘Why don't you lower your voice?'" he said. "Now, when I went to the barber shop , they said, ‘You're not talking loud like you used to.' I notice I can hear myself better."
Wright, who's had his ears checked a few times over the years, was stunned no one found the pearl until now.
One of the first things he did was call his sister.
"She said, ‘You're kidding me, I thought they got that thing out. I said, ‘No, there were two.'
"It's just amazing."
