Q-tips are sharp, trust me.

I am not accident prone, I just find myself in odd situations. Like the time my mother had to bring me to the emergency room at 3:00am, with a pad on my left ear and a medical bandage wrapped tightly around my head.

During my senior year of high school, I took a shower immediately after arriving home, washed my hair, shaved my legs, ect. Afterwards, I did the same thing I always did, and cleaned my ears with a Q-tip. Maybe I sneezed, maybe I was distracted, or maybe I am just an idiot, but somehow I went too far and cut my inner ear. I still do not know to this day how I managed to create a cut with the fluffy end of a Q-tip, but it happened I swear.

4:00pm

I start bleeding from the cut in my ear. Nothing heavy, but enough to justify holding a cotton ball to my ear and changing it every half hour. I didn’t feel dizzy and could hear fine, so figuring it would eventually stop, I started on my homework.

5:30pm

Still bleeding. My mother came into my room, looked at me holding a cotton ball to my ear and said, and I quote, “ I am going to the 99’s with your grandparents.”

“Mom,” I say, confused by her lack of interest at the piece of bloody cotton being held to my ear, “My ear is bleeding and I can’t get it to stop.” I explained the Q-tip incident and she told me not to worry because it would stop soon. She then left to get dinner.

8:00pm

Still bleeding. By this point, I stopped using cotton and instead started to use wads of paper towels. Instead of slowing down ,the bleeding slightly increased. I was casually watching Tv when my mother came home and found me nursing my injury.

9:00pm

Still bleeding. I had school the next morning so I decided it was time to go to bed. My mother said that the bleeding will probably stop soon and that I should just focus on getting some rest. So what do I do? The only thing that made sense to me. As a woman, I am used to casually bleeding while going about my daily activities. Just through on a pad and act like nothing is happening. I took out a maxi pad, put it to my ear and tried to sleep on only that side. Looking back, that doesn’t sound like the best plan, but I had apparently lost enough blood for it to sound good in the heat of the moment.

2:00am

Still bleeding. My dad had been aware of my laceration and decided to check on me in the middle of the night. At this point, I was a bit nervous and had lost more blood than expected. It wasn’t like I had lost a pint of blood, but it didn’t seem normal to be continuously bleeding for eight hours without the cut being healed. Our talking had woke my mother up, and she decided that it was probably time to go to the doctors.

3:00am

Still bleeding. Disoriented and in my pajamas, my mother and I made our way to the local emergency room. I had decided that holding a feminine product to my ear might be considered odd, so instead I took a medical bandage and wrapped it around my head a few times to keep it in place. For some reason that was going to make it more normal. When we got into the hospital, I had to speak to three different nurses without my mother because they thought I was being abused. Apparently, stabbing my inner ear with a Q-tip, didn’t seem like a believable story. Once I convinced the staff that I was in a safe home, they got to work on fixing my ear. The doctor came into the room, used a tiny little hose to suck the residual blood out of my ear, and told me to avoid shoving sharp objects into my ear. Doctor’s orders. I was sent home, only bleeding a small amount which stopped after an hour.

Since I hadn’t slept all night, I stayed home from school and ended up missing the due date on a project in History. It took a call to my mother and a doctor’s note to prove to my teacher that I had missed school due to a Q-tip related injury.

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