A happy ending to a corny problem

By Staff
Leada Gore, Editor
When I was a child, my best friend Marion swallowed a quarter. I don’t know why she swallowed a quarter, other than it seemed like the thing to do.
Upon learning her young child had ingested a quarter, Marion’s mother took her to the doctor. Since Marion wasn’t having any problems breathing or talking, the doctor told her to go home and wait for things to work themselves out. Apparently they did.
Today, Marion is a happy wife and mother who shows no ill effects from having swallowed a quarter.
I doubt she’d recommend it, however.
All this came to mind this last week when I received an email from my brother. He told me his wife, Ieleen, had to take my 5-year-old nephew Collier to the doctor because he’d stuck a kernel of corn in his ear.
It turns out Collier was at school when he came across a kernel of popcorn. Apparently not knowing what to do with it, he for some reason decided to stick it in his ear. He became alarmed when it wouldn’t come out. His teacher sensed something was wrong and he told her he’d put popcorn in his ear. The school called his mother, who picked him up and took him to the doctor.
The doctor tried to remove it but was unsuccessful. The physicians then decided it was too deep to remove, so Collier had to be put to sleep the next morning and have the popcorn removed surgically.
Collier doesn’t really want to talk about the popcorn incident, or why exactly he put it in his ear. His older brother, Isaac, who happened to have a social studies test the day his brother had corn removed from his ear, said if he’d known he could have stayed home from school to have it taken out he would have stuck popcorn in his ear, too.
And while Collier is reluctant to discuss the entire incident, a quick scan of the internet shows he is not alone. Physicians report finding all sorts of things in children’s ears, including toys, crayons, candy, peanuts and small green peas. (If you think about it, hiding yucky green peas in your ear when you’re a child is definitely a lesser-of-two evils scenario.)
In the end, Collier is fine. His ear is fine. The popcorn probably didn’t fare too well but there’s always more where that came from. We will probably never know why it happened though I imagine it has something to do with the reason climber George Mallory gave on why he planned to scale Mt. Everest.
And that, my friends, is a good enough reason for me.