#This is what 16 years-worth of built-up ear wax looks like

A UK doctor was feeling queasy after extracting 16 years worth of earwax from a man who hadn’t cleaned his lugs in almost two decades. A Caters News clip of the stomach-churning excavation has since gone viral online.

“It was comfortably the largest haul of earwax and dead skin I’ve ever removed from a single ear,” said Dr. Neel Raithatha, better known as the “Wax Whisperer” for his renowned abilities to remove the buildup from peoples’ ears.

The unnamed patient had visited Raithatha’s audiology practice in Oadby, Leicestershire, after suffering from severe ear pain, vertigo and disequilibrium for several weeks. He had previously undergone a radical mastoidectomy — whereby part of an area of his skull behind his ear was removed due to infection — but had neglected to properly clean the orifice for a decade and a half afterward.

As a result, the poor soul’s auditory canal had become a repository of gooey and black wax that had amassed there for almost twenty years.

Raithatha said it was necessary to remove the whole ball of wax.

In the nauseating video shot from inside the patient’s ear, the specialist can be seen exhuming dunes of dead skin and cerumen for over five minutes. The entire procedure took around an hour — approximately six times longer than normal, Raithatha said.

“I was shocked by just how much earwax and dead skin I removed,” said the audiologist, who admitted he became “slightly nauseous” upon witnessing the mountain of refuse.

And while the wax-sectomy was ultimately successful, “it was a very difficult and complex case,” Raithatha said.

This isn’t first time the Wax Whisperer has had to remove mammoth amounts of earwax. In 2018, he operated on a woman with a chunk so big that it prevented her from wearing a hearing aid.