A first-year medical student at Vanderbilt University is funding the first nationwide study of paddlers’ exostosis with an $8,200-grant, college loans, and his own minivan

Originally Published in Paddler Magazine July/August, 2008

From a 13-inch television monitor, I am watching an otoscope sneak into my ear and mow down a sparse lawn of prickly hair. It dodges a few clumps of yellow earwax before running into what it is looking for: a bone-growth burgeoning from the wall of my ear canal like an over-inflated balloon.
It’s not supposed to be there. This is exostosis.

“That,” says Ryan Moore, the first-year medical student holding the other end of the otoscope, “looks like it’s very close to requiring surgery.”

Surgery involves one of two tools: a drill or a chisel.

“One way,” Moore says, “is to go through the ear. The other way is to filet the ear, lay it on your face and go in that way.”

Professional kayaker Clay Wright got it the chisel way in early winter 2007. But that was after the growths had trapped water in his ear canal, warming it to temperatures just right for an orgy of bacteria that would eventually burst his eardrum. Initially, doctors told him they couldn’t remove the exostoses until they had eliminated the infection.

“I was trying to fight the infection that entire fall,” Wright says. “I did every kind of antibiotics you can imagine. Forty kinds of eardrops. Eventually they said we can’t get rid of the infection until we get rid of the bony growths.”

Wright, who lives a mile from Tennessee’s Rock Island wave, couldn’t paddle for four months. And even now when he does go, he not only wears earplugs, but he also duct tapes his lobe over his ear, wears a swim cap and a skullcap.

“I’m pretty paranoid,” he says. “Surgery for ACL is one thing, but it doesn’t compare with someone messing with your head.”

No one really knows how many paddlers have exostosis or how many know about it or why it seems to grow so much faster in paddlers than it does in swimmers. This is why Moore is here. Reno is his first stop on what he calls the first nationwide tour to find out, the “Surfer’s Ear Tour.” Of the 90 paddlers he observed at Reno, about half have exostosis in their ears.

“Ten percent of those have it really bad,” he says.

By the end of his summer-long trip, Moore will have driven his Plymouth Grand Voyager—already with 208,000 miles on it—another 12,000 miles to 15 stops, including Vail’s Teva Mountain Games, Washington, D.C.’s Potomac festival, and West Virginia’s Gauley Fest.

“If [the car] goes kaput,” he smiles, “I’ll hitchhike.”

By class time next fall, he hopes to have peered into the ears of 1,000 kayakers while surveying them with all the details that could possibly contribute to these bony growths—how many years they’ve been kayaking, how many times per year, per winter, per spring; what kind of paddling they do: freestyle or river running.

Cold water is the conventional culprit of exostosis. But Moore suspects icy liquid might have an invisible accomplice: cold wind. That’s something he hopes to measure by visiting different regions of the United States—areas like the Pacific Northwest, where many boaters paddle throughout the winter, when the water and the wind are cold, to areas such as the Rocky Mountains, where, yes, the water is frigid, but the wind isn’t so bad.

So far, Moore has not been too successful at attracting kayakers to this corner of Reno’s park. Arlington Street is severing his lonely booth from the bustling bazaar of exhibitors’ tents upstream. And he’s too far downstream for whitewater kayakers to notice. What he does have is a line of food booths, offering an array of greasy food: hot dogs, corn dogs, French fries, curly fries, ice cream cones and snow cones. It is the kind of food that lures the listless teenagers looking for something, anything to entertain them. Like an otoscope. But these kids don’t have exostosis.

So on Sunday, Moore abandons his Teva tent, walks across the lawn and scrambles down to the eddy where kayakers are congregating in an eddy beside the competition site.

This is where the problem begins. Same goes for the solution.