Last night, I woke up at about 3 o’clock in the morning because my left ear was making very funny noises. It would make sort of swishy, gurgling noises and then it would stop. It is not uncommon for my ears to make gurgles noises, because I often get fluid in my ears. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but the noises kept happening and then I started getting a stabbing pain in my ear. It really felt like I had a bug in my ear, but that wasn’t really a likely scenario. So I got up and took a dose of decongestant and filled my nose up with Flonase in hopes that the fluid in my ears would settle down. And finally after 15 or 20 minutes, I was able to go back to sleep. But the next morning I was still having these intermittent funny feelings in my ear, so I decided I had better go to the Minute Clinic and have them look and see what was going on so I could be sure I was treating my ears appropriately.

After taking a full half-hour to take my medical history, which is quite lengthy, she finally looked in my ear. “Tell me there’s not a bug in there,” I laughed.

“Well, “she said, “it looks like there is something in there.”

So she tried to poke it out and scrape it out, unsuccessfully, and became worried it might be some kind of a growth. Then she decided to flush it out, and out it came. And it was in fact a little black beetle! No wonder it felt like I had a bug in my ear! I couldn’t help thinking back to a story I read in which children living in housing with lots of cockroaches always put tissues in their ears at night to keep the bugs out. Shudder…

The most ironic thing about this whole story is that earlier that night I had finished reading a book called Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn, which is about all the little creatures that live with us (and on and in us) and how important it is to refrain from killing everything, which kills only the beneficials and leaves the harmful things to mutate and survive. I was feeling pretty good about myself because we rarely use pesticides and have the windows open most of the time in warm weather and hang the laundry out and play in the dirt and have lots of little tiny bugs in our house. But I have to confess that having a bug living in my ear is a bridge too far.