Kids often capture the hearts of adults with their sense of wonder and delight, but there can be times when that same wonder is questioned when they do some weird things. This was the case of a particular boy who had something stuck in his ear, but there’s a strange plot twist. The young boy thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing if he shoved a pencil in his ear, and it inevitably got stuck in there.
But there’s more to this than meets the eye. Plenty of small children will take random items and try to fit them in their noses, ears, or eyes just because they’re curious. The reason behind this is that children are learning about the world around them by experimenting through touch. The boy with the pencil in his ear was Louis King, and he was not a toddler anymore, so his poor grandmother was shocked to hear what he was going to tell her. If a child is younger than four, then it’s common for them to put things in their mouths, ears, or eyes.
Although most are younger than four, some may keep the habit much longer, like Lewis. The most common things to be shoved inside a nose or an ear are food. Nuts, watermelon seeds, or popcorn are good examples. Lewis’s choice was not food but rather the small stub of a pencil. He found it pretty easy to shove the tiny thing into his ear but found it much harder to get it out, as he was about to find out.
While Lewis’s mom had to work, his granny Sheila would look after him. It was on a day with his granny that the situation took place. The situation isn’t entirely uncommon, so Sheila thought she could handle looking after her hyper grandson with relative ease. She didn’t know how out of control things could get with her watching him. The scariest thoughts that run through a caretaker’s head is that something happens to the child they are looking after.
When Lewis told his granny what had happened, she immediately froze and found that no words would leave her mouth. It wasn’t just the worry about what had happened to her grandson; she knew she’d have to tell his parents about this. She never wanted something to go wrong while she was watching him. Sheila’s daughter wouldn’t forgive her if something happened to Lewis while he was on her watch. Of course, something did happen to Lewis.
While he was quietly playing with a coloring book in his bedroom, she should have followed her intuition and checked up on him to see why he was so quiet. If she had only watched him a bit more closely, then it never would have happened, but it’s hard to keep your eye on a 10-year-old. The problem only came to Sheila’s attention when her grandson complained about his ear being sore. If Lewis had kept quiet, then there would have been much greater consequences. Sheila took a look at his ear, but without any equipment, she could only see darkness.
It was important that she acted quickly. She gathered all her things and followed the emergency procedure for circumstances like these. Would she be fast enough? Lewis started crying and fiddling while Sheila couldn’t see anything. Sheila was in a panic, and it rubbed off on the boy.
He now understood how severe it was having something stuck inside his head that shouldn’t be there. Sheila nearly had to hold his wrists as he tried to hit his head to dislodge the object. The panic only made it worse. Sheila understood that she would have to get her grandson to the hospital right now. Sheila entered through the doors to the hospital, holding the boy’s hand behind her.
At that point, Lewis was sobbing. He didn’t know what he had done to himself and what problems it would incur. Just how tense and serious everything was made him panic even more. They didn’t have to wait long until the doctor came out and had something to say. The doctor to help them was Philip Russell.
After peering into Lewis’s ear, he realized that his tools weren’t going to cut it, and he’d have to get more advanced ones. Lewis’s ear was blocked off completely by the pencil. Lewis was still with fear, which made it easier for the doctor to work on them. It was taking a while, and the doctor didn’t have anything positive to say. The pencil was lodged so deep in Lewis’s ear that it took a lot longer than anyone expected to get the tool around it.
But eventually, Dr. Russell managed the nearly impossible. He told Lewis to hold very still as he extracted the dangerous piece of wood in graphite from deep inside the boy’s ear canal. As the object reached the opening of the boy’s ear, everyone was stunned. It looked nothing like a pencil at all.
“You’ve done a good job of it, I’ll tell you that,” the doctor comments to Lewis, and the sheer depth of the object. His granny looks on and shakes her head in dismay. “Is that all of it or just part of it?” the doctor asks, and Lewis responds with a decisive, “That’s all of it, I think.” “Yeah, that’s all of it,” but the doctor wasn’t satisfied with just Lewis’s word.
“Let’s have another look in your ear,” he said as he tilted the boy’s head again to complete the search. What he saw inside left the doctor feeling very uneasy. A tiny round and rather wide object balances in the doctor’s forceps. Lewis, feeling some relief in his head, turned. As soon as it was out, everyone in the room looked at the offending object, and puzzled looks spread from doctor to granny, and then they looked at Lewis.
He didn’t seem too worried that the pencil in his ear was actually a whole battery that happens to look more like a watch battery to me. Dr. Russell questions the boy, “Are you sure it was a pencil?” And suddenly, Lewis isn’t sure anymore. “I don’t think it actually was.
Now, having a pencil lodged inside your ear is dangerous enough, and the risks are obvious. As Dr. Russell explains, the worst-case scenario is that he gets a deep-rooted infection, and that could affect his hearing, balance, coordination, and if left long enough, he could even go deaf with it. It was a lucky thing that skilled doctor was able to find it and remove it entirely. “I can’t see your eardrum, which means it’s gone.
It means you’ve made a hole in it. Now, that can happen with things like this,” the doctor said, addressing the upset granny. “We don’t repair it or anything. It will repair itself.” Luckily for Lewis, the eardrum is much like skin and should grow back naturally within six weeks.
Now a lucky break for granny too. According to Lewis, the pencil was stuck into his ear not that day, but a full week earlier. He must have started getting a sore ear or just plain worried that his own attempts of getting it out were, in fact, only forcing it in deeper. Either way, granny was in the clear since none of this happened on her watch. “Where he would have got that from and how it’s got in there, I don’t know,” she admits to the camera filming her.
It’s not unusual for kids to stick things in their ears or noses or even other kids’ ears and noses, but what is unusual is thinking you’ve stuck a pretty large object like a pencil in your ear when it turns out to be a battery. And while a pencil sounds super pointy and stabby, it’s actually a far cry better than the danger a battery poses. A battery left unchecked could leak acid, which can really complicate things. Dr. Russell says it happens fairly often that kids stick things in their ears and noses.
“The fact that he said it was a pencil and it turned out to be a watch battery, I’ll tell you that’s pretty bizarre, but we’ve seen this thing before recently. A girl with a runny nose was discovered to have put a clothespin in there.” The grandmother and grandson duo were chosen to appear on BBC television series “Bizarre ER” before they even knew the strange twists that were coming up. What was weird and a little concerning was that the boy thought a battery was a pencil. So we have to ask ourselves, were there other objects he’d put in his nose or in his ear, and he’d managed to get out successfully by himself, or was the poor little Lewis just afraid he’d get into more trouble for a battery than a pencil?
It doesn’t seem like he’ll be telling any of his secrets anytime soon, but we do hope he’s learned a valuable lesson, even if just for poor old granny’s sake.
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