I had fluid sloshing in my right ear consistently from about 2020 til last year. Took forever to address it because of a mix of pandemic stuff and one not entirely competent ENT, but I was referred to a different ENT and it turned out that the bone between my inner ear and where my brain lives had eroded and I had spinal fluid leaking into my ear canal. Semi rare but not QUITE as serious as it sounds, although it makes one vulnerable to meningitis, so we did surgery to fix it. Well, the doc did the surgery, I was sedated. ;) Recovery went super well although I did have some significant hearing loss, I'm guessing from all the infections that I dealt with in the interim.

But yeah, now I think it's just my sinuses draining into my inner ear. I'm hoping that's what it is anyway, as the sensation (and the fluid consistency) is completely different. At the risk of TMI, it's less sloshy and more goopy, so probably not spinal fluid.

Holy fuck. It may not be as scary as it sounds, but it sounds really alarming.

I've heard of something like that before -- a runny nose that never stopped having to do with leaking spinal fluid. So apparently it's a thing, and apparently it doesn't cause you to run out of spinal fluid or something horrific like that.

@Susan Rati Lane yep! Mine didn't go down into my nose but a CSF leak like the one I had could very easily do so. Apparently that's often how it gets diagnosed.

And I mean yeah, it was pretty unnerving if I'm being honest, lol. Left untreated it can actually cause the brain to start pushing down through the hole which'd be REAL bad. Luckily mine didn't get that far.

Funny thing is that I joked early on before my first ENT visit that I needed to make sure my brain wasn't trying to escape through my ear. Felt a little bit psychic when I found out that was actually kinda what the problem was. 😆