I Can't Hear You, I Have A Pencil In My Ear

Yesterday Nick had a routine doctor's appointment to check on the state of his asthma.  Well, his asthma is doing just fine, thank you very much.  His preventative medication is working very well and he hasn't had an attack in many months.  So everything seems good.

For some reason, as part of the exam, the doctor checks Nicks ears.  Left ear looks fine.  Right ear - not so fine.  There's something in there.  She has Allison and I look through the little device and asks if we have any idea what it is.  All I can see is that the object is red.  The doctor gets a probe and sort of pokes at the object.  Nick objects that this hurts.

At this point the doctor has no idea what is in Nick's ear.  She's not even sure if it is a foreign object or some sort of polyp.  Great.  For his part, Nick denies ever putting anything in his ear.  The doctor goes off and schedules an appointment for us with a pediatric ENT doctor for this morning.

Nick isn't really fazed by this, but Allison and I are worried that he has a polyp growing in his ear canal.  We make an agreement that we won't do any research on the Internet because that will just freak us out by demonstrating all of the potentially really bad things it could be but probably isn't.  Five minutes after this conversation I'm downstairs surfing the web, scaring myself shitless.

Needless to say, it's a long night for Allison and me.  Nick and I finally get to the ENT doctor at 10am.  The doctor pokes around in Nick's ear for a few minutes with a variety of instruments before announcing that the item in question is definitely a foreign object.  I manage to restrain myself from getting up and hugging the doctor and dancing with the nurse.  (I call this "playing it cool.")

After another few minutes and a bunch more instruments, the doctor finally manages to pull the object in question out of Nick's ear.  It appears to be a quarter inch long piece of lead from a red colored pencil.  Nick still denies having any knowledge of how it got in his ear in the first place.

Despite the title of this post, the item never caused Nick the slightest bit of discomfort or caused any symptoms whatsoever.  We have no idea how long it was in there.  If we wouldn't have had a doctor's appointment yesterday, it might have stayed in there for a long, long time.

Nick didn't think the experience was too bad and the doctor even gave him the piece of lead in a little cup to bring to show and tell.  That ought to go over well.  Allison and I are very relieved.  We're that special kind of relieved that happens when you worry very intensely about your child and then find out everything is okay.  Needless to say, Nick and Xander have been getting lots of extra hugs today.