The Q-Tip won the a battle, but I won the war.

Last night I decided to take a late shower since I wasn't really tired. I got out of the shower and went through the motions: conditioner, lotion, cleaning out my ears with a q-tip. As I was cleaning out my right ear, I was thinking about something else. All the sudden I had a strange feeling and some slight pain. I pulled out the q-tip and, lo and behold, the cotton was missing. I stuck my finger in my ear to get the cotton out and proceeded to push it farther in. I then got a pair of tweezers, which didn't help. (You'll all be happy to know that I didn't go too far in since I couldn't see what I was doing.) At this point it was almost 11pm. I sent a text message to a friend of mine to see if she still awake. She was. (She being Angie, a nurse.) I went over to her house. She tried flushing out my ear with a syringe of warm water which didn't help. She couldn't see the cotton with a flashlight and didn't want to poke around too much in my ear in fear of hurting me. After a half an hour, we gave up. Now, you might ask why I didn't just go to sleep and worry about it the next morning. The reason is that I was in pain. The pressure was bad enough that I would never have been able to sleep. I decided to go to the ER. I know, I know-it was probably a bad idea because of the money it costs, but I was in pain.
So off in the blizzard I went to the ER. I had to wait in the waiting room for almost a half an hour. By the time I got back there (around midnight,) my whole head from throbbing. I explained what happened and the doctor took a look. We started trading jokes about the situation. Soon two very attractive young men came in to help (me with wet hair, no make-up, and a stained t-shirt.) They put their two cents in. The doctor had to look around the ER for the proper instrument, which happened to be something called Alligator Forceps (see picture.) The cotton came out in three pieces. By the time I left it was 1am. All in all, I feel incrediablly silly but am very glad that someone invented Alligator Forceps and that Angie was so willing to help me late at night. Man, there are times my life seems a little bit like a sitcom.