The Mighty Q-tip

Something kind of funny happened this morning. I was cleaning out my ears with Q-tips, same thing I have done every day for the last 15 or so years. This time, however, as I improperly inserted the Q-tip into my inner ear canal, something I have also done every day for the last 15 years, the Q-tip end stayed inside my inner ear canal upon Q-tip extraction. I stared dumbly at the naked end of the Q-tip for a moment, contemplating the embarrassment of explaining to the staff in the E.R. that an incompetent 27-year old has just jammed a Q-tip into her ear and was unable to get it out. It's one thing if you're a quirky 5-year old child who is experimenting with the number of peas that can be inserted into various bodily orifices, but quite another to be a (quasi-)functional adult doing the same. Not that I was shoving Q-tips anywhere else but my ears, of course. Hey, this is a g-rated blog, people!

Anyway, I walked around my apartment for a few minutes, trying to figure out what to do. When I moved my jaw around, there was a kind of a muffled squish sensation in my left ear and I heard everything through more of a fuzz than usual. I was suddenly really glad that I had health insurance in case the doctors discovered that I had jammed the Q-tip right into my brain. And then I would have cotton fuzz floating around in my cerebral cortex! And then the surgeons had to perform a risky brain surgery to save my life! No, seriously though, it was kind of funny. I propped up one mirror to another mirror to see if the Q-tip was visible in my ear - to no avail. It had disappeared into the chasm.

Suddenly, I thought of my tweezers! I made a bargain with myself. ONE TRY, and if I couldn't get it out, Chris and I would grab a couple of good books and spend a long, pleasurable afternoon waiting in the E.R. while the doctors first attended to those with real emergencies. I carefully inserted the tweezers into my inner ear canal (when will I ever learn?? 'Cause when you jam one thing into your ear, the perfect solution is to jam another thing into your ear to get the first thing out.)

So, dearest reader, I am sure you're on the edge of your seat with excited anticipation, awaiting the climax of the story. Can I have a drum rollllll please?

SUCCESS! E.R. trip avoided! Embarrassment saved! Q-tip lesson learned! All this without one single second of panic. I feel endlessly wiser than I did pre-Q-tip-insertion.