When the Bug Hits, That's the Time to Scratch It

I was tired from a day with my sister and her husband (then boyfriend) in their town of Blacksburg. He was a graduate student there, and she lived with him, and they both hated it. As we drove down the street we would point out to each other the various morons and idiots of Blacksburg, with explanations of what was particularly moronic or idiotic about them. She showed me the places she liked to go, the store where she worked, the people she was friends with, and I tried my best to take in all these things and to be polite and friendly, which is always more effort than anyone wants to admit.
Lying down to sleep on the air mattress, I was just beginning to doze when I felt a tickle on my right ear. I moved to scratch it. There was another tickle. I put a finger to my ear to examine the situation further, and without meaning to pushed a beetle deep into my ear canal. I then began to scream.
“SARAH!” I screamed, “SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR! SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR!”
My sister was really very good-natured and helpful for a person who has just been woken by a brother running into her bedroom at 2 in the morning, yelling something unintelligible about his ear. She calmly listened to what I had to say, my head all the while tilted to the right and twitching manically, my whole body shuddering with each movement of the bug against my eardrum.
“Do you know what ear-candling is?” she asked me.
“NO, WHAT THE FUCK, I DON’T, ARRRGH, KNOW WHAT IT, FUCK, IS,” I hollered at her as nicely as I was able.
Ear-candling is, as my sister explained to me, a process by which ‘toxins’ are removed from the ear using a hollow candle made from paper coated in wax. You put the small end in your ear and light the other end, the idea being that somehow the burning creates some sort of vacuum that draws things out of your ear. Later I would research this further to find that the ‘toxins’ which accumulate at the bottom of the candle are actually the ashes of the candle itself, that the process removes nothing from your ear whatsoever, and furthermore risks dripping hot wax into your ear and is therefore quite unhealthy, but at the time my sister knew only that ear-candles were supposed to suck unwanted things out of your ear. I was skeptical, but in no position to argue.
I laid down on my side, right ear up, and my sister inserted the ear candle and set it aflame.
“I DON’T, FUCKCRAP, THINK THIS IS WORKING” I told her.
“Hold still!” said Sarah, “It won’t work if you don’t stay still and let it burn.”
“GODDAMN, IT’S HARD TO LAY, FUCK, STILL WITH THIS BUG IN MY HEAD, HOLYCHRIST,” I told her.
The ear-candle burned down. My sister cut it open and showed me the ashes that were supposedly toxins from inside my ear, but no bugs. The powerful ear-candle vacuum had proved no match against this mighty beetle, his six legs still dancing a gigue on my eardrum. Quackery exhausted, we proceeded to the hospital.

I sat in the waiting room for what felt like several days. It is understandable now why a hospital would see “bug in ear” as a relatively low priority, but at the time, with the filthy little bastard still wriggling away in my head, the holdup seemed like criminal negligence.
I watched as some upset frat boys came rushing in to check on a friend with alcohol poisoning. They were refused admittance to their friend’s room, and so began to call the nurse who had refused them a bitch and a whore and the probably one or two other misogynistic words they knew. My sister whispered something cutting about how members of Greek organizations are somehow less capable of showing emotion in their voices than normal people, how they might say “My friend died in a car crash” with the exact same inflections as “I burned the steaks.” But I was in no mood to appreciate her wit.

Finally, I was shown to an exam room where an awkward man calling himself Dr. Livingstone examined me.
“Well,” he said, looking into my head with his standard doctor’s ear inspection device, “that’s a great big bug you’ve got in there.”
He left and came back with some water.
“This is going to be wet,” he said.
I lay down on my side, and he filled my ear with water. A few minutes later, the bug was still doing cartwheels, and I was still shuddering and yelling stuff like “MOTHERFUCKING ASSFUCK” and “HOLY FUCKING COCKSHIT,” so Dr. Livingstone upped the ante and filled my ear with hydrogen peroxide. This time the bug crawled out, and Dr. Livingstone flicked my ear with his finger in a most un-scientific way, sending the little guy sailing across the room.
“You can stomp on him if you like,” he said.
The bug was indeed big, much bigger than I had thought. We put him into a Ziploc bag so I could show my sister, who was asleep in the waiting room.
While Dr. Livingstone wrote out a prescription for ear drops I noticed a pair of tweezers lying on the counter.
“Was that the next step?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but we try not to go that route. Sometimes the bug’ll grab hold of your eardrum when we do that, and there’s a good chance he’ll rip it.”
I didn’t stamp on the bug—my sister set it free, “the right thing to do” she said. Fucking vegetarians. She took a picture though, my bug on the sidewalk next to a quarter to give it scale. It looked harmless enough sitting there, and the pain in my head was gone. I felt as if I'd awoken from a nightmare, excited to tell bored friends about some crazy shit that had happened in my sleep.