Cardiogirl: 19% body fat 100% fun

I’ve mentioned before that I have a faux medical license which I update regularly via satellite classes (shows on Discovery Health) and a residency with Dr. Google. Quick, listen. Did you hear that noise? That was a collective shudder and groan from all of the actual medical doctors across the globe.

So last night I was falling asleep while watching “Dr. 90210″ on the E! Channel. Surprisingly, Dr. Will Kirby from Big Brother has shimmied his way onto that show. I know he’s a dermatologist, but apparently he has crossed the great divide from skin doctor to quasi-plastic surgeon to the C-list stars. Because he was administering botox shots to Jai, the former Cultural Guru from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

Like Dr. Kirby, Jai is attempting to parlay success from one career (television host) to a somewhat related new career — singing superstar. Jai had a photo shoot scheduled a week away and wanted to plump up his lips and clear his complexion.

It was around this point that I fell asleep. The next thing I knew Mr. Cardiogirl was shaking me awake with a very concerned look on his face. The lights were on and he was explaining a distressing situation. As I was waking up I thought he was in a car accident or had been hit by a car walking to the party store. That’s not what happened.

It’s important to know that Mr. C is very diplomatic, almost to a fault. He always soft pedals anything he’s going to say to me, and sometimes I just want him to blurt out “All of your files on the computer got deleted.” But, in that scenario he will explain to me that there’s a slight issue. While he was attempting to clear up the RAM on the computer and defragment things an unfortunate turn of events occurred. All of my files were lost.

Just to clarify, that has never happened. It’s just an example of how he presents things to me.

So he’s telling me how he went outside to go to the party store across the street to get beer and chips while I was sleeping and something really crazy happened. A moth flew into his ear.

He was holding a Q-tip in his left hand. He told me he’d been trying to remove it for the last five minutes with no luck. All he could get were small fragments of the moth’s wing.

And it was currently stuck inside his left ear, fluttering and buzzing inside his head. This is the point when he put both hands over his ears and buried his head into the mattress trying to keep insanity at bay.

I felt like an ER resident at the end of a 30-hour shift who had taken a cat nap in the break room. “We have a Code Red in ER Bay 5. We need all available personnel, stat! Cardiogirl, get the crash cart!”

Initially I was in a dazed, shocked state as panic tried to take over my sleepy mind. He was writhing on the bed telling me all he could hear was the flapping of the wings and we need to GET IT OUT OF HIS EAR NOW!

So I stood up and surveyed the situation. Suddenly a thought popped into my head. I said, “We can put rubbing alcohol in your ear and that should kill the moth, right?” Mr. C yelled, “Fine, whatever, just get the moth OUT!”

I ran to the bathroom, got the alcohol and the blue bulb syringe that comes with every newborn baby, and sucked up some alcohol. I returned and squirted it in his left ear as he groaned and described the moth’s valiant effort to avoid drowning in rubbing alcohol. Did I mention there was much thrashing about and gnashing of Mr. C’s teeth during this time?

And then he announced the fluttering had stopped. The moth had died.

Okay, I was feeling proud and disgusted at the same time. The pressure (on me) had gone down a notch as there was no more fluttering inside of Mr. C’s head. However, now he could feel the obstruction and at this point he was really holding onto sanity by a mere thread.

I still felt the urgency to remove the moth.

I didn’t want to puncture his ear drum with the Q-tips and, at the same time, I didn’t want to push the moth further down the ear canal. In the midst of all of this, I was thinking, ‘D@mn, buddy, you have huge ears. I never really noticed that before.’ I didn’t think Mr. C would appreciate my observation, so I kept that to myself.

I was only able to get bits of wing with the Q-tip, just like Mr. C. I also couldn’t see very well and asked if he knew where the flashlight was. He thought it was downstairs, so I ran down, leaving him to deal with his nightmare alone and frantically searched for the missing flashlight. I couldn’t find it. The girls like to play with it and they never return it to its resting place so I was only able to find the empty spot where it should have been.

I went back upstairs and told him I couldn’t find it. “Turn on the overhead light,” he yelled. “That should be better than nothing,” he barked as he was smacking his hand on the mattress trying not to completely freak out. Prior to this we had our bedside lamps on which created ambient light, but not enough bright light to perform surgery.

I took another unsuccessful stab at it with a clean Q-tip and out of nowhere, Mr. C produced a pair of tweezers. “Try these!” he said as he smacked the mattress again out of frustration.

The first try produced a larger bit of wing. That’s when Mr. C said, “I really don’t want to go to the Emergency Room for this.”

The second attempt yielded success and I extracted the hugest, blackest bug I have ever seen. I sucked in air and made a squeak as I dropped the bug on a piece of Kleenex and jumped backwards away from the corpse. Even though I knew I drowned it in alcohol, I expected it to fly away.

It remained still on the white Kleenex. Mr C. examined it as he violently rubbed his left ear. Again, I had the thought that Mr. C must have a set of the largest ear canals east of the Mississippi. And again, I kept that thought to myself.

I swear that bug was as large as a medium-sized green grape. I am not exaggerating. Saying it was the size of an anemic cantaloupe — that would be exaggerating. But not by much.

Now it was my turn to freak out and hold my hands over my own ears. I felt a rush of emotions all at once. I was disgusted, amazed, proud of my medical abilities, surprised, curious and completely freaked out. I now fully understand why an anesthesiologist is required during actual surgery.

Mr. C stared at the bug for a while as he rubbed his ear. Finally, he looked up at me and announced, “Now I really need a beer.

*
Addendum:

This is pretty close to what was extracted. According to the website that produced this photo the size of a male beetle is roughly 44 mm (excluding the mandibles) which is 1.73 inches. The wing span is just over 90 mm, 3.5 inches!

I’m not sure if it was able to fully open its wings whilst trapped in Mr. C’s ear canal, but the thought of something that size inside of his noggin is traumatic to me. I don’t know what effect this information is going to have on Mr. C. I’ll have to ask him later, as he is at work right now.

Oh yeah, that’s not a moth, either. That’s a Flying Stag Beetle, just in case you were curious.

*

One last addendum: Mr. C did not make it to the party store before the bug journeyed into the center of his mind. He actually had to go outside, braving the insects and the elements, a second time to get a 12-pack.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 5:21 am and is filed under Humor, Medical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.