Your boss is clearly quite the slave driver, I mean - you've got to go to the hospital. Is HAVING to take time off for THAT really THAT unreasonable?! He should look at it from your perspective. Do you want an ear infection? No. Do you want to take time off to go to the hospital and in turn lose out on money, at this time of year? Fuck no!
See, we have three people off as it is - one lass has some family issues to deal with and two are in hospital, so we're short staffed during the silly season already. Two of my colleagues are being overworked, but they KNOW full well that I'm in no state to be there because, let's face it, lack of balance + spaced-out-ness + deafness = bad customer service, and I've apologised to them profusely for having to drop this shit on them; hell, I've even offered to cover a bunch of shifts for both of them in January to make up for it. But again, they understand my predicament having seen the consequences firsthand; fuck, even the customers are expressing concern because I've been so blatantly incapable lately. So I'm a bit upset as to why I'm seemingly being chewed out for this and rushed into getting back to work ASAP - fuck man, if I could just will something like this away then I fucking would.
Alas, I went back to the walk-in yesterday and their response was pretty much "Oh shit, err... that ain't normal. Go to your GP and immediately get them to refer you to ENT at the hospital because we can't do it for you, but the only thing we can think of is to give you Amoxicillin. Hope you don't have a Penicillin allergy, but if you do, erm.... sorry. Reiterate to your boss that we think he's insane for making you work in this state while you're at it". So I'm on 500mg Amox three times a day for the next week to see if that helps at all with my hearing, going to my GP at 4 today to get a referral to the hospital and we'll see what happens from there. The general consensus is that my hearing will restore itself over time, as it usually does, but they have to take extra measures due to the severity of the hearing loss this time around and the drastic effect it's having on day-to-day activities.
tl;dr - Shit be whack, yo
EDIT - So I just got back from work. Had a natter with the boss about everything and let him know what the crack was, surprisingly dece about it really. We both get how shitty the situation is, not to mention the timing of it, but the general consensus is that I'll be back at work next week - if the Amoxicillin and a trip to ENT can't sort it out quickly, then there's really fuck all I can do aside from wait it out. Which to be fair, is a reasonable assessment; no way can I just leave everyone hanging and not pull my weight during the Christmas period, because that's just bloody unfair, though I knew that already. Still, better to have a set of hands there - even if it's on a small level - than to be completely understaffed, and if all I can do is wait for my hearing to return, I'm A. going to be doing fuck all, therefore B. going to lose out on money, and C. going to fuck over my colleagues even more. I can't just not work for the next month until my hearing is back, because I'd go fucking insane.
So yeah. Not exactly ideal but I'd rather do it this way than cause more problems than are present already.