Kids Are Weird

Had my 15 minutes of fame this morning.

I called in to a local radio station when they asked "how have you been injured by common items" after they related a story of a woman injured by a thrown french fry that lacerated her cornea.

Here's our story.

A few years ago, my son stuck a popcorn kernel into his ear.  Why?  I have no idea.  He stuck it in his "hearing" ear - he is functionally deaf in the other.  I was not able to pick it out (with tweezers, on an embarrassed, wiggly and uncooperative special needs 6 year old kid, probably a bad idea), so I had to take him (on Friday night, of course) to the nearest ER in McMinnville, Oregon, to get it out.  Three nurses had to hold down my screaming son, and the utterly inept ER doctor tried to get it out by scraping the ear canal with a little spoon-like tool, causing my son's ear to gush blood.  After a few attempts (looked like he was trying to scoop ice cream), he gave up and said, "Uh, sorry, I can't get it out and now there's too much blood to see it".  He then said we'd have to go to Portland to Doernbecher's Children's Hospital at OHSU to get it looked at.

So on Saturday, we drove the 2 hours up to Portland, OR.  The took one look at his mess of an ear and declared it was too swollen and bloody to do anything with it, and sent us home with instructions to come back on Monday.

On Monday, we again drove the 2 hours up to Portland and another 2 nurses and I had to restrain him in order for the doctor to try to remove the popcorn kernel.  No luck and my son was in hysterics.  They told us to go home and scheduled him for day surgery on Friday because he obviously wasn't going to cooperate.

On Friday, we drove back up to Portland, put my son under anesthesia for literally 2 minutes and dug the kernel out.  Doernbecher's was fantastic (http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/health/services/doernbecher/), but three ER visits and surgery was not what I thought would happen over a popcorn kernel!

Kids are weird.  The DJ thought the story was hilarious and so it was aired live.  Now half of Eugene knows what a goof my kid is :)