'Ear this...

i started talking to a friend on the IM yesterday about my busted knee, and the conversation turned to one on war stories.. of past injuries and trips to the A&E. my friend was an active fellow and started off by saying nobody could beat the stuff he'd been through. i agreed. he however decided to relinquish his title after getting a load of the weird stuff i've managed to put myself through.. well, not everyone likes to hear injury war-stories so i'll just post one bizarre one here.. no, it's not particularly graphic, but given that i seem to have a rather high tolerance of these things (i dunno, so far everyone's cringed at the fact that i readjusted my own dislocated patella), feel free to skip the parts you'd rather not hear..

the story starts some time back in my final undergraduate year, easter holidays. i had just had my ears pierced and had finally switched from the boring ol' piercing set (which stems are larger in diameter) to a new pair (which is the regular type you find in stores, i.e. stems aren't as thick). so i went to bed with the said new earrings on (NB. i never did so again ever after this incident).

the next morning i got out of bed with blood on one side of my shirt, wondering whether i was still in some strange dream. nope, perfectly awake. and the blood was real.

initial thought - mosquito. but hell, with the amount of blood there was, i would have had to wipe out an entire colony in my sleep!

then i noticed there was also blood on my right ear, and although the earring was still there, the stud-fastener at the back had come off.

ahhh ok, so the sharp point of the exposed earring stem must have cut against some part of my outer ear or the back of my neck. so i pulled the earring off and looked into the mirror.

nope, no cuts or scratches on ear or neck.

and there was still this dull pain in the ear lobe.

after much peering into the mirror and probing around a bloody earlobe, i finally found out what happened - the small earring fastener had somehow got itself embedded INSIDE the raw flesh at the back of the ear lobe (i had pierced my ears only recently, remember).

and to make matters worse, by pulling out the earring from the other side earlier on, i had inadvertently pulled the offending fastener deeper into the flesh. ow. cringe.

so i got a perplexed corridor-mate to hold up a mirror behind my head while i tried to figure out how i could get myself out of the mess. it was just too hard to get any leverage on something embedded in the back of my ear... my friends didnt dare try, so i went to the campus GP who tried easing out the fastener with tweezers but it hurt like hell so he sent me to the university hospital's A&E for local anaesthesia.

so, on a bright early Sunday morning, i had left my wonderful breakfast of pancakes behind to trod down to the A&E centre of the UK's largest hospital (apparently also Europe's largest teaching hospital), with a thing in my earlobe (and a long-suffering friend who had probably by then been totally put off earrings).

finally it was gonna be a-ok, there would be no pain, the danged fastener's gonna be out, and i'm never going to wear that pair of earrings ever again.

however there was a minor 'drama' at A&E. the triage nurse who took my particulars absent-mindedly wrote down "FB [foreign body] in right ear". in my anxiety, i didn't notice the crucial typo.

when i finally got to see a doctor after about 2 hours' wait, he went, "ooo-k, what do we have here, foreign body in right ear..". all at once I realised the nurse's error but before I could correct him the doc started PULLING HARD ON THE EAR LOBE to look inside the ear and i started screeching "ear LOBE! ear LOBE!" at which doc responded "Ear lobe? Ahhh. Easy-peasy. Just let me get some tweezers and we'll have it out in a jiffy, love," and i must have screeched a bunch of expletives I don't recall now. well, i didn't walk all the way across campus and wait for 2 hours only to have someone else do the same thing the campus GP had already unsuccessfully attempted earlier, dammit!

so there was another wait, this time for 4 hours (not kidding), now outside the operating theatre while i struck up a conversation with a poor fellow who nearly got his finger shaved off in an industrial accident; and other poor souls with miscellaneous maladies. the wait was so long i was starting to have visions of the wound closing around the foreign body and having to live the rest of my life with a thing in my earlobe.

and so finally, the stark brightness of the OT (with pleasant music playing to boot) was a nice welcome change of atmosphere from the waiting benches in the dim corridor outside. must say i felt like an idiot climbing onto the steel table myself (by the way, operating tables look like tiny kitchen trolleys!) and lying down while chatting with the attending doctor ignoring all the machinery around me (I was probably the strangest person to have come through the OT doors that day), but boy was i glad when the needle went in (I didn't even feel it!) and everything was over within 10 seconds of that.

so i trodded back to Hall, just in time for dinner which my pals had whipped up for their poor corridor-mate who had just returned from the hospital with the thing that was in her ear.

no, earlobe!