A Bug in Your Ear

     Sayings like, "I want to put a bug in your ear" are kind of strange.  It just means to give someone a reminder or a suggestion but if you’ve ever had a bug in your ear then you wouldn’t appreciate someone putting a bug in your ear.  Just ask awesome Voyageur Crew member Victor who actually had a bug in his ear this morning.

     Victor was outside working this morning when a big bug flew into his ear.  Immediate reaction for most of us is to stick a finger in there to try and get it out but remember what the doctor says? "Never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear."   Victor came to me in search of a q-tip and was very agitated.  He could hear the bug buzzing around in his hear but he couldn’t hear anything else out of that ear.

    I did what any normal person would do in the circumstance.  I looked up "bug in the ear" on the internet to try to figure out how to remove it.  Armed with a towel and baby oil I had Victor lay on his side with the ear with the bug in it facing upward.  I put a few squirts of baby oil in it and that was suppose to kill the bug and make it float to the surface.  We waited awhile and then attempted to irrigate it out with water.

     That wasn’t working so I placed a call to our helpful North Shore Hospital for their advice before I proceeded.    They told me it was ok to use a syringe to fill the ear canal with water and that it sometimes took days for bugs to come out of ears.  After multiple squirts I thought I saw something.  I took a closer look and determined what I saw to be a wing tip.  I carefully took the tweezers and removed the large, dead bug out of his ear.

    YUCK!  Don’t ever put a bug in someone’s ear, it isn’t nice at all.

Bug in the BWCA