Keep the bugs out of your ear!

We were going to take the canoe to the pond in Easton for a few hours. Tony (the younger) and Sam were playing baseball in the back, so Tony (the elder) and I dragged the pollen- and cobweb-covered blue plastic boat out from under the porch to rinse it before loading it into the car.
As we dragged it off the grass onto the driveway, our pivot wasn’t so graceful so the canoe tipped and landed on its bottom. Tony was shooing something away from the side of his head. Next he was frantically slapping at his left ear before he started yelling “there’s a bug in my ear!” and running for the house. The door was locked, of course, and he kept asking me to “help!!” What could I do? He went in the bathroom calling for the flashlight and a toothpick (!). Sam got the flashlight and I handed him a chopstick (that happened to be in the sink from Sam’s playing the night before).
Then I said we should try to drown it and flush it out with some water. So I threw a cup of water into his ear. Most of it landed on the bathroom floor which was now muddy from Tony’s shoes and all the jumping around he was doing, poor thing.
The boys weren’t freaked out; I wasn’t freaked out; but Tony sure was. He said it was like a jackhammer drilling into his ear drum. Not a “little” jackhammer – he said it felt like a huge animal in there. He said it was a moth that flew in, and he asked me (really yelled) to call 911.
The 911 guy asked me to call right back so he could pass me through to the fire department. “My husband has a moth in his ear,” I said, “and we tried to flush it out with some water,” “and alcohol,” Tony shouted. Apparently he’d put some rubbing alcohol in too.
The fire department guy told me to hold on. He came back after a few minutes and said, “you could try to suction it out. Do you have one of those things to make gravy with?”
“Oh, a turkey baster? No, but we have a baby nose suction thing.” I almost called it what we call it: booger sucker.
“Sure,” fire guy said, “try that, and it doesn’t work and he’s in distress, call us back and we’ll send the ambulance.”
Oh, he’s in distress. I tried the booger sucker about 4 or 5 times, but all I got was a little wax. I started imagining what it must me like inside Tony’s ear canal. Surely the moth must be dying or dead by now, stuck on the wax that’s there to protect us! Apparently not, because every time the moth started beating its wings, Tony started leaping around. I didn’t know what to do – it’s not like it was a burn or a cut that I could deal with – so I ran downstairs to Google “moth in ear.”
I read two stories (on blogs…not my favorite sources), but they both mentioned emergency rooms and flushing it out.
So the four of us drove to Sturdy Memorial Hospital (where Sam was born!). Later Tony described it as “really loud…like it was chipping on the hard wax in there…scary because I thought it was going to continue eating on my flesh.” Yuck!
The boys were still pretty calm, it was about 1:00 in the afternoon, and after all, we would probably be the only emergency room visitors who weren’t there for fireworks-related injuries on July 4th!
We waited about 15 minutes before he was called into the triage room. The nurse (male, but not Ben Stiller) took his blood pressure, pulse, and temperature, and he asked Tony when he’d first experienced the symptoms. “Symptoms?!”
We next waited in a different waiting room for another 15-20 minutes before he was called in by a man in scrubs (not the man from Scrubs). Tony asked, “can my family come with me, because they want to see it?” I guess the boys did, but I didn’t!
The man (doctor, I guess) looked into his ear and mentioned “a lot” of wax, then started telling the four of us, “never, never use Q-tips.” This was the worst part of the day for me...not for Tony.
He brought over a plastic syringe and small basin (what we call a “throw-up bucket”) and one, two, three flushes into Tony’s ear, out came the moth…and some small pieces of wax. OK, I looked.
Tony’s face was all about relief!
As he was taking his gloves off, the doctor said that this was the easiest thing he’d had to do all day. He also said this was only the second time he’d seen a bug in the ear (he wasn’t that old, though). The first time, it was a centipede! Ew!
He checked Tony’s ear again and “a lot” of wax was actually the moth’s wing he had seen. Great, I thought, I can keep using Q-tips!
Tony had to sign some release and some privacy papers. We got one of the carbon copies. Under “Special Instructions” was written: “Keep the bugs out of your ear!” Of course, in doctor handwriting it looked like “Keep the boys out of your car!” which is really odd.
Oh! The moth was still alive! It was moving around in the water- and wax-filled basin!
Yes, we brought it home.