Consider this Part Two of last week’s column about my early morning trip to the emergency room to get six stitches in my earlobe after colliding with a bedside table. For the record, my ear is fine. The stitches are out and my wife says you have to look really closely to even tell there was ever any damage.

However, the little accident revealed two things about me that I don’t much like because both are signs of old age arriving much sooner than expected.

Less than eight hours after my trip to the ER I was sitting at my desk here at The Independent. I was feeling fine until the phone rang. Just answering it proved to be quite painful.

That’s because when I answer the phone, I always put the receiver against my right ear. But that ear was the injured one, and for the first two days after my accident, it was too uncomfortable to use the right ear when talking on the phone.

No problem, I thought. However, switching to listening with my left ear when on the phone proved to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

First of all, it was uncomfortable. For me, it was kind of like batting left-handed. Or pricking a finger on my left hand when testing my blood-sugar level. It is much easier to take my blood from a finger on the right hand, but every now and then, I have to force myself to prick one of my left-hand fingers just to give the right-hand fingers a bit of relief.

But it took only one phone call for me to discover another, more disturbing reason why I use my right ear when talking on the phone: I hear much better with my right ear than with my left ear.

My wife has complained for years that I am losing my hearing, but I have refused to listen to her. As far as I am concerned, I hear just fine. Maybe not as well as I used to, but good enough.

To satisfy my wife, I took a hearing test a few years back. I passed. Maybe not with flying colors, but my hearing was adequate if not great.

When I watch television, I do not have to have the volume so high that normal hearing people a block away can hear every word. I wear an insulin pump. When it is not working properly, an alarm sounds. I admit that nine times out of 10 I can’t hear the alarm. Instead, someone walking near me will ask me, “What’s that alarm?”

If I fail to respond to the alarm I can’t hear, the pump will start vibrating. I can always feel that, so failing to hear the alarm is really no big deal.

As a child, I had severe problems with my ear, and a doctor told my mother that I probably would eventually need a hearing aid. He may have been right. But 55 years later, it hasn’t happened yet.

The other thing I learned from my recent accident is that I have fallen out of bed many times in the last 35 years. Or at least that’s what my wife says, and she should know.

After injuring my ear by hitting the nightstand when I fell out of bed, I told my wife that as far as I knew, it was only the second time I had ever fallen out of bed.

That’s when my wife told me that I regularly fall out of bed.

“Then why don’t I know about it?” I asked. “It seems like that is something I would remember.”

“When it happens, I don’t think you ever really wake up,” she said. “You just climb back in bed and fall immediately back to sleep without ever saying a word?”

My wife said she has been thinking about getting a rail for my side of the bed.

“If you do, I won’t use it,” I insisted. “I’m not ready to sleep in a crib like a baby.”

“But what if you hit the nightstand again?” she asked.

“We’ll put some padding on it,” I said. “All this is making me feel old.”

“That’s because you are old, dear.”

To that insult, I gave the only reply I could think of: “Huh?”

JOHN CANNON can be reached at jcannon@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2649.