Left in a f lap by winged invader
Recently I read a story about a New Zealander with an insect stuck in his ear. It’s the sort of tale that ticks all the boxes: the ick aspect, the horror angle, the laughing-atsomeone-else’s-misfortune factor, but where once upon a time I would have chortled, nowadays I do not.
Because there is actually nothing funny about having something stuck in your ear; you only have to experience it to find out.
The night it happened to me, I was on the phone to my mum, having not long put the kids to bed. Goodness knows what we were talking about but, whatever it was, my shrieking cut it off.
Editing out the expletives, the exchange went like this: I said there was something in my head, she said it was my brain.
I said it was buzzing, she said that was the sound of me thinking, and told me to call her back.
Dropping the phone I lurched around the kitchen like, well, a bear with a sore head, pawing at my ear and bellowing bluely, waking the children, who stood in wonder at the spectacle.
‘‘What’s wrong with Mum?’’, one toddler asked the other.
‘‘She’s gone crazy,’’ their older brother said. They all nodded.
The other adult in the house tried to help until giggling turned his limbs to jelly.
He could only make vague swatting actions in my direction as he collapsed, unable to do anything other than breathlessly snort apologies.
Plunging my head under the tap offered no relief because whatever the buzzing thing was, it appeared to not have to breathe to buzz.
Stabbing my ear with a cotton bud yielded much the same result – the buzzing thing was unkillable.
While I was upside-down in the bathroom, my mother rang back.
‘‘Oh dear,’’ she said to the other adult, ‘‘I can hear she’s still carrying on. Tell her to put oil in her ear. Night.’’
Regardless of their extensive medical careers, family members are never to be trusted, so it was off to the hospital we went, three excited children, a rubbery, limplimbed adult, and me still shrieking occasionally.
Once there, insult was added to injury when the security guard thought I was on my way to the labour ward. I was furious.
Doctors and nurses are regularly and rightly commended on many things, but their ability to keep a straight face is all too often ignored. Visions of alien movies were running through my head as I forgot any rudimentary knowledge of human anatomy.
This thing was going to get into my brain, I told the doctor. In fact, it was eating its way in there now. I would become a zombie or something even worse, maybe a conspiracy theorist.
No, I didn’t know what it was, I told him.
Things that buzz include flies, bees, wasps and mobile phones, and right at that moment I couldn’t discount any of them. One thing I knew for sure was that it was massive.
It turned out to be a moth no bigger than half a fingernail.
A friend later hoped it wasn’t afraid of wide open spaces because that would have made its last moments in my head all the more terrifying.
After the doctor stopped laughing he popped the poor moth into a specimen jar which my son took for news the next day.
I wore a hat pulled down over my ears every night for months and life went on.
The moral of this story?
Even the smallest things can cause the biggest distress if they get into your head.
Get help when they do.
Virginia Fallon is a Wellingtonbased Stuff reporter and columnist.