What’s buggin’ me May 12, 2009

I got chainsaws buzzing around me right now. Our boxwood trees are coming down. I’m not gonna lie. I get a little choked up when I watch a tree fall. It’s a sad thing to cut off the life of a beautiful creation. But I think it was the boxwood elder beetle that crawled into my ear and took up residence one day that was the final straw for me. It was high time for those trees to go straight to hell.

At first, I thought the scratching in my ear was fluid build-up. I thought my ears were popping from the pressure at 30,000 feet. We were on our way to Chicago and I had been suffering from a pesky respiratory infection. Little did I know the peskiness of my condition had nothing to do with mucus and everything to do with a segmented thorax on an expedition to my tympanic membrane.

You’d think I would have had the sense to see a doctor. After all, when a relatively normal person detects a sudden chronic, irritating noise in her head, isn’t it standard protocol to deduce that something is amiss? But for better or worse… in this case, worse… my husband and I fancy ourselves naturalists. So instead of going to an MD, I went to our acupuncturist, who gave me a fancy remedy to “puff” into my ear. Neal had tried it before and said it worked wonders, however jarring the actual process.

I decided to give it a try and was fascinated with the results. It was like I could actually hear and feel the pressure dissipating. How could I have known that it was nothing of the sort… rather it was very much a little creature reeling from the impact.

The day it crawled out of my head, I was reaching to satisfy an odd ticklish sensation. It fell onto my hand, covered in the powder and left a trail on my outer ear. Needless to say, I was more than just a little stunned at the discovery. Mildly horrified would be accurate, which is when the call to the tree fellers occurred.

People think I’m nuts when I tell them the story. Rightly so. But as it turns out, there are over four million google results for “bug in the ear”. Thankfully, to my knowledge, very few incidents have resulted in death and/or deafness. One guy, a high school football player, had to have his bug surgically removed. He made the news!  Apparently the little varmint had done some pretty significant damage to the dude’s eardrum. I guess his little mandibles were having a grand old feast in there, which tells me that either football players have delicious ear wax or beetles have a bad sense of direction.

Sufficed to say, it’s a pretty revolting thought to envision a bug crawling around your head. One can’t help but wonder if they can get into your brain and do some serious damage. It certainly would explain a lot.