An earful

Uh, oh, I thought. That can't be good. It was 8:10 a.m. and I had just busted the end of the Q-tip deep into my ear. All I had in my hand was the stick. The cotton swab part was gone.

(Just for the record it wasn't actually a Q-tip brand Q-tip. It was the cheap kind. My wife bought them and on the bag in big letters it said "Seconds." The name brand of these particular cotton swabs, if memory serves me correctly, was Sav-uh-buck, luse-n-ear.)

I've always had ear problems. They itch. They scratch. They plug up. They get infected. My entire childhood was earmarked by ear infections and swollen glands.

My neck would swell up like a tire, and I'd do my best not to act sick, because if I was sick it meant I couldn't go outside and if I couldn't go outside, well, there was no sense in living.

Chris, are you sick? They'd ask me.

No, I'm not sick, I'd lie.

My neck would be so swollen that I'd have to swivel my body at the waist to shake my head no.

One time my ears got so bad, Mom took me to the doctor and he shot water in them to get the crud out. It was one of those procedures that felt like you were drowning.

Fortunately, my mother was there to comfort me.

She stood in the corner and made pained faces while pieces of my brain drained out of my ear into a stainless steel cup strapped under my arm.

"You're doing great, Chris," my mother cheered.

You're supposed to grow out of that sort of thing, which I guess I have. Scratching my ears has become a hobby of sorts. Just about anything will work. Toothpick. Bobby pin. Paper clip. The pointy end of a sharp pair of scissors.

Also, beer and a fistful of aspirin work wonders on an earache.

But now I had a piece of cotton in there, and it felt like it was crawling into my brain. So I did what comes natural: I dug at it with a paper clip, figuring I could fish it out, easy.

But it didn't come. So I asked my wife to help, and she set me down on a stool and got a big old flashlight and some tweezers and dug around some more and then sighed.

Sighed?

Yes, sighed.

"I can't see anything in there," she said.

So then in moment of despair and fear and loathing I did the unthinkable. I called my doctor. You did what? They snickered.

A few hours later, I was in the doctor's office and the friendly nurse weighed me and took my blood pressure and my pulse. All of which are very important procedures when you have a piece of cotton swimming as fast as it can to the recesses of your brain.

The nurse left the room, and I waited for the doctor a few minutes and read my first ever issue of Marie Claire, a women's magazine.

The magazine featured an adult article in it about a marathon activity that my mother warned me back when I was 14 would make me go blind.

That's right, a marathon. Like 10 hours straight. These women were doing this. I don't know why. I just looked at the pictures.

When the doc knocked on the door, I threw the magazine back in the drawer and grabbed a Field and Stream like a real man and acted really interested in an article entitled, "Bassing secrets with Earl."

The doctor made me sit on the table or bench or whatever they call it. I hate sitting on that paper, it makes me feel unwanted or unclean or both. She then peered in my ear.

"There's nothing in there," she said.

"Look again," I ordered.

She got out another instrument and looked further. Nothing.

"It's a little red," she said.

"But where's the cotton?"

"It probably fell on the floor," she said. "It's not in your ear."

She then showed me a diagram of a human ear and how, no matter how hard I pushed it, a cotton swab would not go to my brain because my eardrum was in the way.

Then I got the cotton swab lecture about how you shouldn't use cotton swabs or bobby pins or toothpicks or paper clips to dig around in your ears.

"You should put olive oil in them," she said.

"Olive oil? Doc, I'm not trying to make salad in there," I said.

She didn't smile.

"It will stop the itching," she said.

Maybe I'll try it, I thought - as long as I can put the oil on the end of a bobby pin.

Chris Peterson is the hard -of-hearing editor for the Hungry Horse News.