Plugged.

So I decided to accept the embarrassment that is sure to come with this story, solely for your amusement.

This morning was like every other morning. Hear the alarm. Push the snooze. Push the snooze again. Push the snooze one more time. Still sleep for 5 more minutes without the snooze, and end up sleeping 10 minutes. Look at the clock and realize I have 20 minutes before I need to be leaving the house. Literally jump out of bed frantically and run to the bathroom. Brush teeth. Contacts. Choose hair accessory. But wait. My ears feel like they need cleaning. Do I have time? No. Do I make time? Yes. Do I regret this decision? Yes.

In goes the qtip, out comes the qtip. I look down, and something strange has happened. The qtip no longer has the cotton. Oh my goodness it's in my ear. What do I do? Like any other person (or is it just me?), I immediately start freaking out thinking that it's going to be stuck in there for life. I try everything... fingers... tweazers... nothing. By this point I have 5 minutes to do my makeup, get dressed and run to the bus stop. I try to forget that there's a piece of cotton stuck in my ear, but it's a little difficult to forget something like that.

I get to school and debate quietly in my head whether or not I should tell anyone this story. But it was too ridiculous of a story to resist. I tell Caroline, and she immediately starts freaking out and tells me I need to quickly go see the school nurse. Of course, I make her come with me.

I feel like a child who has stuffed a marble into my ear as I step into the nurses office, afraid to tell her my story. With the help of my favorite translator, the nurse chuckles and she reaches for her ear checker, for lack of better words. She peers into my ear, and chuckles some more. There's nothing in there she says. But just in case, she lets Caroline look into my ear to see if she sees anything. "Nothing but wax," she says. The nurse explains that it probably came out or was never stuck in there in the first place, and that the pressure I feel is probably psycological. At this point, I feel like the lamest, most ridiculous 23 year old on the planet.

I go through the rest of my day, as normal as possible, trying to forget that I might be imagining something stuck in my ear. Lucky for me, today just happened to be a super long day filled with meetings, a bridal shower, and a practice. By the end of all this, somewhere around 5:30, my ear starts pulsing a little bit. I feel a lot of pressure, and I'm certain that I can't be imagining it. I tell my trusty coworker, Carolina, and once more, she tells me this is an emergency and I should high tail it to the nearest doctor.

I heed her advice, and quickly rush over to my neighborhood ear, nose, and throat doctor. As I sit patiently in the waiting room, my anxiety continues to build as I try to come up with a reasonable story for why there is something stuck in my ear. I conclude that honestly truly is the best policy, and come clean of the morning's happenings. For the second time that day, I am laughed at by a medical professional. He looks in my ear, chuckles some more, and shoves something practically into my brains (or so it felt like it). Suddenly, my hearing, which I didn't realize was suffering, magically reappered. On the tip of his prober was the small, fluffly, round, cotton that made it's home in my ear canal for the day.

Moral of the story: Never trust a Korean Qtip.

The End