Kiss Of Deaf: Daughter Sucks Out Mother's Eardrum (VIDEO)

A new term has entered the medical lexicon: the "kiss of deaf". In what is surely one of the stranger moments in the history of medicine, a mother's hearing has been significantly damaged after receiving a kiss on the ear from her young daughter:

Yet it wasn't the sound of the smackaroo that damaged the hearing of Hicksville homemaker Gail Schwartzman, but a suction force that displaced the woman's eardrum, paralyzed a tiny trio of bones and left residual sounds in her head. Schwartzman's case will be the subject of a medical journal report within the coming weeks, outlining for the first time what the author calls "the kiss of deaf."

"What actually happened, I was out of the house that day," Schwartzman said. "And when I returned, I went to say a big hello to my daughter. She was 4 years old at the time. She was sitting on the floor watching TV, and she had really missed me. So I sat on the floor next to her.

"She grabbed me and gave me a hug and a really big kiss on the left ear. And while she was doing it, it felt like she was sucking the air out of my head. I couldn't push her away because I had this terrible sensation in my head," Schwartzman said.

"When she was finished, I had no hearing in that ear. The hearing slowly came back but with screeching noises in my ear," she said, referring to sounds known medically as tinnitus. Although some of her hearing has returned, allowing her to hear in muffled tones, the tinnitus has remained.

For more on the "kiss of deaf", watch the video report below: