Farm "Injury"

I guess all the naysayers were right after all. This part of Texas IS a dangerous place.

A couple of days ago I had to take my oldest son (almost 16) to the urgent care clinic. (For the uninitiated, that's sort of like a doctor's office but they claim to be more urgent. I saw no indications that they were any more urgent than the DMV.)

He woke up with a bug in his ear. Some sort of small black beetle had crawled into his ear and in his sleepy state he tried to get it out with his finger, which pushed the beetle right up against his eardrum. So what did he do? He got a Qtip to try and get it out.

At this point the bug, half-squished, is now right up against his eardrum and fluttering about madly. This caused him a lot of pain and disorientation as a clawing, fluttering beetle beside your inner ear mechanisms might be expected to.

I tried to flush it out of his ear using the garden hose but no luck. It was in there too good.

I had to take him to the clinic so a pretty little nurse could use her fancy tools to extract a dead (drowned and mostly squished) beetle from deep inside his ear. It took longer to fill out the medical form (mostly with false information) than it did for her to extract the bug. She was very excited and almost bouncy with delight. Apparently this is the first beetle-ectomy she's ever performed. She exclaimed, "I've removed beans from ears but never beetles." That alarmed my son. He was slightly worried about how beans might enter one's ear canal. She pointed out that it was mostly toddlers who end up with things lodged in their ears. This humbled him right up.

So the great beetle-in-the-ear adventure ended without any real long-term harm, though my oldest son still inspects his bed covers thoroughly and is whining occasionally about wanting to sleep wearing earmuffs. (After the pretty nurse showed up to remove the bug, I was worried he'd put a bug in his ear every night to go see her again.)

So I just thought I'd report this little scenario and perhaps warn you all against moving off-grid into the desert to live a more simple and agrarian life in harmony with your Christian principles ... watch out, because you might get a bug in your ear.