Christmas Beetle!

A middle-aged heavily tattooed man was brought by ambulance into my emergency room, both his hands tightly cupping his ears.

"My ear is aching!! I can't hear you!" he proclaimed in his intoxicated breath.

"Which ear?" I tried to act blur, secretly upset by his sinfully unjustifiable action.

You called the ambulance for an earache!!

"Yes, I felt something crawling in my ear and dug with a cotton bud. Then it started bleeding. So I panicked and rang the ambos." he replied, with a tinge of flushed embarrassment.

I peeked into his right ear with the otoscope. Hmmm....it looked full....lots of earwax....some dried blood from the excoriated ear canal....some hairy brown thin object sticking out....wait, is that a leg?....an insect in your ear?!....

I became excited and interested. I had never removed an insect from a ear so far, not since when I had started practising 5 years ago.

"Where's the olive oil?" I couldn't wait to plunge my aural forceps into his vulnerable inlet.

As we waited impatiently for the living foreign body to drown in the sea of parrafin liquid and earwax, I slowly inserted my predating weapon, made a firm grip at what felt like the body, and YANKED it out swiftly.

"Ah!!!" patient gave a brief scream. "It's a Christmas beetle! !@#%^&*...." he took a glance and exclaimed in frustration, followed by a string of expletives.

I stared with disbelief and awe. The lifeless body measured at least 1 centremetre, intact as a 10-cent coin. To imagine that it actually managed to embed itself in that narrow pit of darkness of the external ear canal, torturing the poor victim with hours of enduring pain.

"Why is it called a Christmas beetle?" I asked with the innocence of a 3-year-old.

"It comes out only during Christmas because it is attracted to the lights on the Christmas trees at night. Some of them are beautiful, with rainbow colours on their bodies", my visibly relieved patient explained, a far cry from when he first presented rolling on the bed.

"Is it unique to Australia? I haven't seen one before back home." I probed at the pesty brown arthropod, hiding my glee while reminiscing about my childhood days when I would sadistically pluck the wings out of the poor suffering flying insects with my playmates.

"I think so....it appears only in the summer months, which coincides with Christmas here", my smiling patient continued, in his now fatherly tone.

"Can I keep it? I wanna show it to my grandchildren", he requested. We gladly obliged. My nurse brought the ornament to the main emergency unit and enthusiastically described my incredible feat to the rest of the department.

"Thank you, Elizabeth. I feel really good and relieved now. And yes, I can hear you clearly", the gentleman beamed with gratitude.

I am still grinning from ear to ear at this very moment.