Q-Tips: Friend or Foe?

I'm not so sure about cotton swabs. My wife is, and she'll jab those suckers in her earhole with reckless abandon, but me - I just don't know.

I think I read once that leading otolaryngological experts advise against inserting foreign objects in your auditory canal. "Nothing smaller than your elbow," I believe it went, and I'm inclined to heed that. Nobody wants to puncture an eardrum.

Except Lope - my goodness, she gets in there with gusto. I just stand by and wince, listening to my own tympanic membranes throbbing sympathetically.

And it's not like she's coming up with that much wax, either: I could see the enthusiasm if she was striking gold each time, but for the most part these Q-Tips come out looking pretty much like they did on the way in. Then they just get tossed on the swab-heap in the wastebasket under the sink, this towering fuzzy burial mound of spent sticks.

I stick mainly to Kleenex or toilet paper, myself. Just a perimeter cleansing - take the shine off the satellite-dish area and call it a day. Oh, occasionally I'll try going in for a more thorough exploration, but it's tricky to get the T.P. to stay on my elbow.

Plus sometimes, I swear all that prodding just makes things worse. You're working in there, swabbing away brain matter most likely, erasing years of expensive education, and next thing you know you're stumbling out of the bathroom, off-kilter and woozy, confessing to the cat, "I really don't know why I do this. I could hear fine before, and I don't recall grossing anyone out of existence with egregious amounts of earwax or anything. Now I - I CAN'T HEAR SQUAT, MAN!"

Noah just looks up at me with a long, weary blink, and proceeds digging in his ear with an ideally-sized hind foot. Showing off.