Orange County Register

Recently, for unexplained reasons, Curly Girl decided to put a plastic BB in her ear.

Surprise! It got stuck. She came running over, demanding to go to the hospital.

It was in there too tightly for her to get out, but still visible.

Though it didn’t actually hurt, she screamed and cried plenty, as if it were a hot coal in there instead of an innocent piece of plastic.

I asked her exactly how that happened. Did she think the BB could be fired from that position? And where was the air rifle, because I just couldn’t see any reason for a girl her age to stick something like that in her ear.

I mean, come on, maybe a toddler. But a fifth-grader?

She didn’t really have an answer, but she did have a solution: Take her to the emergency room.

Now, this all happened on a Saturday night, and even if you’ve never been in a hospital in your life, you probably know that you don’t want to be going to the E.R. on Saturday night.

Not unless you have at least six gunshot wounds. Preferably lodged in internal organs.

Otherwise, you’re gonna be waiting a long, long time. Also, my own recent trip to the emergency room, when I discovered I had a brain tumor, didn’t make me all that anxious to return.

Instead, I told her to go find a pair of tweezers.

Now, I knew this quest was going to be sort of like looking for the Holy Grail, because no pair of tweezers remains more than a week in my First Aid kit.

Instead, they can be found later in the flowerbeds, where someone was using them to pick up beetles, or in the front yard, where another child was collecting ants.

Meanwhile, my friend Barb, who was visiting, is looking at me like, “Wow, what a bad mother you are,” and thinking to herself, “I would have taken her to the emergency room.”

She still remembers when her little brother Buzz got a chicken lotto ball stuck up his nose and had it vacuum extracted at the hospital.

Anyway, a sobbing daughter soon reappeared, stating the obvious, that no tweezers were to be found anywhere near where they belonged.

So I sent her across the street to the neighbors house, and she returned with a useful pair. Obviously those parents have figured out a better method than me to keep them out of their kids’ hands.

I made her sit still, which wasn’t easy with all the sobbing and screaming, and Barb held her head while I performed surgery.

It only took maybe a couple of minutes to get the tweezers around the offending part and yank it out

The sobbing and screaming didn’t stop immediately, though I pointed out to her the offending object was NO LONGER THERE.

I suggested maybe, next time, she should NOT STICK THINGS IN HER EARS.

Even though I was successful, I still felt a tiny bit guilty, because I know a lot of moms would have rushed their precious ones off to the E.R.

As a middle-aged mom, though, I am a big fan of my big fancy First Aid kit I bought from the Red Cross when I did CPR training.

Did the kid slice something open? That happens regularly around our house, since my kids are always getting into something they shouldn’t.

Patch ‘em back up yourself. I keep this kit under the front seat of my car, and it comes in handy, on trips, at soccer games, plenty of places.

The weirdest accident was when Cheetah Boy threw his sweater up in the air in Curly Girl’s bedroom, it shattered the overhead light, which then cascaded down and cut his arm in several places.

However, none of the wounds were deep, so I did my normal procedure.

Apply pressure to stop the bleeding, pour in disinfectant, and, if necessary, a butterfly bandage.  That is all the doctor would do, anyway.

I was reminded of how much I dislike emergency rooms last week, when Curly Girl had to do the mile run at school. She was extremely short of breath afterward, to the point that the school nurse called me.

I drove over, picked her up and drove her directly to the E.R.

No messing around with kids who can’t breathe right.

The awesome folks at the hospital got her into a bed right away and started her on a monitor. By this time, though, her breathing had already returned to normal.

Of course it  had.

Hours later, we emerged from the E.R., with a promise to call her regular doctor. Well, that was fun.

The end result was that Curly Girl was diagnosed with asthma brought on by exercise. She has a cute inhaler now, and she takes Singulair at night.

So, in this case, the moral of the story is: Breathing emergency? Go to the hospital. BB stuck in ear? Get some tweezers.

Or, better yet, just don’t put anything in your ear smaller than your elbow.

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