A one in a million shot (my apologies to Seinfeld)...

The Seinfeld fans out there might understand why I thought of George's dad when I read this story about a man who died after sticking a Q-tip in his ear. The coroner's report states that he ruptured his eardrum with the Q-tip, developed meningitis, and subsequently died from the complications. My heart goes out to his family.

One of the docs I used to work with had a saying about putting things in your ear: "Nothing smaller than your elbow." Meaning, essentially, that you shouldn't be putting anything at all in your ear. Far from removing wax from the ear, Q-tips actually just jam wax into the canal. And whenever you stick something into your ear, you run the risk of perforating the eardrum, although actually dying as a result is pretty rare.

That being said, lots of people cannot resist the allure of the Q-tip. Actually, one of my ex-boyfriends used to get a look of rapturous ecstasy on his face whenever he cleaned his ears with a Q-tip. And a lot of Asians use little brass spoonlike instruments to actually scrape the wax out of the canal. Of course, whenever you ask a patient if they use Q-tips, they vehemently deny it, but believe me, your doctor can tell if you're using Q-tips on the sly, just like your dentist knows that you're lying about flossing regularly.

The weirdest Q-tip-related patient encounter I've ever had? Not too long ago, I picked up a chart in the walk-in clinic and the presenting complaint: "Q-tip stuck in ear" was scrawled across the top of the chart. Hmm, could be interesting. Anyway, I went to interview the patient, an elderly man who was accompanied by his wife. As I sat down, I looked carefully at the patient's ears but there was no sign of anything amiss. With his wife vigorously nodding her head in affirmation, the patient told me that while he had been cleaning his ear with a Q-tip, the cotton bud had somehow gotten pulled off the stick and was now stuck in his ear.

So, I grabbed the otoscope off the wall and carefully took a peek inside the ear. To my surprise, there was nothing there. Just a pristine, anatomically perfect ear drum winking back at me. No sign of anything abnormal, and definitely no cotton swab. I relayed my findings to the patient and his wife.

"But I can feel something in there," the patient said. "Look again." Maybe it was not the right thing to do, but I humoured him and looked again. Nope, nothing in there. I explained to the patient that the ear canal is a very small space and that I had confidently visualized the entire, empty canal.

"Well, it's gotta be in there," the patient said, folding his arms and looking a bit agitated.

"Yes," his wife said crossly. "If it's not in there, then where did it go?"

I suggested that perhaps the cotton bud had fallen on the ground and that in any case, it was most definitely not in the ear canal. There are very rare occasions in medicine where I will say that I'm 100% positive of something, and this was one of them. Yet despite my reassurances, it was like the couple was suffering from some kind of bizarre folie a deux, and the more I tried to reason with them, the more stubbornly they clung to the delusional belief that the man had part of a Q-tip stuck in his ear. Eventually, my preceptor also inspected the ear and confirmed my findings, and the patient and his wife stormed off in a huff. I kind of wonder if they hit up any other walk-in clinics after they left.

The moral of the story? Just don't stick Q-tips in your ears, boys and girls.