The last couple of weeks I have been playing Russian roulette with paper stick q-tips. Every morning I get up and stick one of these in my ears. And they often come apart in my ear. Then I have to scramble to remove the cotton end from my ear because it falls off the stick. For years I used the plastic q-tips which do not come apart. Somehow I bought these paper ones and instead of throwing them away I kept using them. And they continued to come apart. Until the other day when the tip came off and I couldn’t get it out of my ear. I was up early that day around 5:00 am in the morning. I just got up and was still a little groggy. And I was not even sure if the cotton was still in my ear. I had my wife look at it and she could not tell at first if it was in there. So I started looking on the floor to see if it fell on the floor. Finally I got two mirrors and saw that little tip of cotton way down in my ear canal. I could not talk Laura into digging it out before she went to work. Boy, this was a dilemma. It was like working on the car and you cannot get the nut off of the screw. And you have to decide about cutting the nut off – how much damage will I do. I had heard about people going to the doctors to get q-tips removed from the ear. I wanted so bad to avoid the embarrassment of having to go to the doctors to do this. So I looked frantically around the house for a pair of tweezers. And you can never find them when you need them. I had to go down to my tool box and get a pair of long nosed pliers to see if they would do the job. It was tough trying to hold the mirror at the right angle to see in my ear and shove the pliers in there and try and fish out this elusive piece of cotton. Well it did not work and I had to struggle with the non-self-reliant predicament of having to go to the emergency room to have it removed. I was thinking about going back to bed and forgetting about it. Because it was not really interfering with my hearing I considered forgetting about it. But I had also heard about infections resulting from this. So I went to the emergency room and tried to talk the receptionist into taking it out but she did not think she could. She told me that if it was her own husband she would give it a shot. I had to give up my autonomy to a doctor or nurse I thought. Actually I ended up seeing a young physician’s assistant. She used very long pair of tweezers to yank it out. It took her three times to get it out. I could hear it ripping apart in my ear. For the final try she had me lay on my side while she pulled out the last of the cotton. She gave me a few suggestions to put alcohol in my ear if there was any blood. She might have cut my ear drum a little. I knew that I had made the right decision going there because there was enough pain involved in extracting this that I would have never been able to endure it doing it on my own. A nurse followed up-and told me nothing smaller than your elbow should go into your ear. And no q-tips. I told her that a big part of my life had just passed from me not being able to use q-tips anymore. I told her that using q-tips is kind of pleasant, really pleasurable. She just laughed at this and repeated nothing smaller than your elbow. Then proceeded to ask if I had ever had tuberculosis and some other diseases. And I just said that I had only had malaria once which she noted and said you must have lived overseas. And I said that I had. From all this excitement from this I went up to the gym to work out since it was nearby. I went a long time without eating because I had broken my routine, and it felt great. That is all hunger is most of the time routine and habit….