The Sticker that Was

Yesterday was interesting. If you follow on Instagram, then you already know this story. Yesterday was spent in the hospital. All day. Because of a sticker. Things started off normally, but took a turn around 6:30. Ethan had a shower then headed off to Abbey's room to get dressed. I assumed that he could handle that himself, so I went off to fix Abbey's hair. The next thing I know, Chris is coming in asking if I have tweezers because Ethan put a sticker in his ear. It seems that instead of getting dressed, he decided to explore Abbey's room and found a sticker. He is six and his sister's room is not a place that we normally let him hang out in alone. For reasons only know to God, he found a sticker and put it in his ear. No parenting manual prepares you for this.

Well, after determining that he could not remove it, Chris and I headed off to the hospital. We dropped Abbey off at the bus stop and dashed over to the local hospital. We thought that they would quickly pull out the sticker and we might still get him to school on time. A small bit of our hope was stolen when they said that we needed to head to the University hospital in our town because they had the doctor that was trained to use the "special tweezers for children's ears". We joked in the car on the way over that he must take them home with him at night because they were so special.

Our first moment of real seriousness came when the doctor, after looking in Ethan's ear, said that if it was too painful for Ethan that they might need to put him to sleep to get it out. We strongly encouraged Ethan to hold still and let the doctor get it out then. He, of course, screamed when the doctor tried to remove the sticker. They sent us down to wait in the ER. Well, the doctor thought that maybe they could just give him a sedative and that might be an easier route. Ethan took the sedative and then woke up fighting when the doctor tried once again to remove the sticker. Except that this time, because of the sedative, he didn't know where he was and why was so many people looking at him and why did his ear hurt. It honestly was a tiny bit funny, because after the doctor quickly determined that they would need to put him all the way under, Ethan still dealt with the sedatives effects for about 20 minutes. He would dose off and they wake up and ask me where he was at and why did he feel dizzy. I would explain and he would then discover the stickers for the heart monitor on his chest and ask about those. After explaining this, he would then tell me how Franklin in one of his books had the same thing. Then repeat 5 more times.



We then waited for three more hours for his stomach to clear out so they could give him a general anesthetic and get the sticker out, once and for all. Silly us fed him breakfast not expecting him to stick something in his ear. He headed in about 12:30 and I was getting nervous when he still wasn't out 30 minutes later. I mean, just pull the sticker out. When he was in recovery and they brought us the sticker, several things suddenly became clear. It wasn't really a sticker. It was a small rhinestone. A small, round, hard rhinestone. To a six year old boy, that is a "sticker". And he had pushed it quite far into his ear trying to get it out before letting us know about it.



We ask him over and over why he would stick something in his ear and he seems to have no idea. At one point, I ask him, "If you could go back, would you stick that in your ear?" His answer? "If I could go back, I would go back to breakfast and tell myself to just go brush my teeth!" That would have been a great idea!