stick it in your ear!

Worst day ever.

Woke up this morning with a tickle in my ear. I just thought it was hair. When I got to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and realized one of the three earrings in my left ear was missing. Went back to the bed and found the stud, but couldn’t find the post (the back of the earring). Guess where it was 😦

So I went to the hospital where I expected it to be a quick flush-’er-out procedure. The nurse took one look in my ear and gasped ‘Oh my stars!’, and then went to gather three of her nursey friends so they could stand around me, looking in my ear and gossiping about the novelty of it. Then two doctors came and had a peek.. no one had ever seen this happen before – could it be that rare? Anyhow, at a loss for what to do, they stuck this in my ear:

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I took the picture while they had all scuttled outside the door to continue talking loudly about me. The picture doesn’t quite convey how very LARGE the darn tweezers were, but trust me. They were big. This might give some context as to just how big they were:

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BIG, RIGHT???? It hurt like the dickens when they tried to pull the post out – involuntary tears sprung to my eyes with the shocking pain of it, which made a fat nurse press me sympathetically against her boobs. After jamming me in the head a bunch of times, they decided the tweezers weren’t working (YOU THINK?) and referred me to a ear-nose-throat specialist who couldn’t see me until 4pm.

I didn’t know what else to do so I went back to work. By this point, the post is resting against my eardrum, which hurt. A lot.

ENT dude sees me at 4 and after a number of colorful jokes about the ear not being a bad place to lose an earring (???), fishes it out rather easily and painlessly, while I lay on an examining table with a number of magnifying contraptions surrounding my head. If anyone in the Fairfax/Falls Church area needs to see an ear-nose-throat dude, this guy saved my life.

The offending culprit:

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My eardrum still hurts, but I’m glad the day is over. Whew.

~ by jeanne on May 15, 2007.