Ezra got a ball stuck in his ear.

On our way down the mountain from Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai, Ezra turned to us and said he couldn't hear in his right ear. He's had problems before with pain from his ears not adjusting to changes in air pressure and we were driving down a long steep hill.

So David and I tried a bunch of things. I held his nose and had him blow. Seth pulled out a piece of gum for him to chew. David gave him some water. It was getting so dire that I actually put my mouth on his ear and started sucking.

All this time he was getting more and more scared and saying, "There's something in my ear!" Finally David asked him if there was really something in his ear and took a look. Sure enough, there was a red plastic ball from a BB gun stuck in there. Apparently he had put it there while no one was looking.

We tried various things, prompted by our desire to avoid a trip to the hospital, but restrained by our fear of making things worse. We put a straw in and tried to suck it out. I learned at this point that Caroline was the declared champion of Suck and Blow at a youth conference (but unfortunately even her amazing sucking skills were not enough). We also tried a headlamp and tweezers, but it became clear that we would need someone with more expertise and better tools to do the job. David gave Ezra a blessing and then Ezra and I left for the hospital.

[Here you can see the straw in David's hand and the concerned look on Ezra's face.]

Ezra is one of those kids who is deathly afraid of hospitals and doctors and of people using weird tools on him or on people he loves. We got in there and luckily all the nurses and doctors were women (not as scary) and they all spoke English with him. Still, when it came time for him to lay down and let the doctor put the long scary metal stick in his ear, he freaked out.

The more he freaked out, the harder it was for the doctor to do her job. I had to hold him down and they had to bring extra nurses in because I wasn't strong enough. He was screaming and it was horrible. She had to try five separate times and each time it just got worse. Finally she said they would have to put him under anesthesia because she was afraid of puncturing his ear drum and there was no way she could delicately get the ball out because he was just moving too much.

At this point, David called and Ezra sobbed while he talked to him. He handed me the phone and I gave David an update. We hung up the phone and I was seriously wondering whether to try one more time and put Ezra through the same torture, or just wait until the morning and bring him in for the anesthesia method. I talked to him about the choices and I can't believe he said he wanted to try one more time. He was so scared but he laid down and I held his head and the other nurses held his arms and legs and I had him count to 20 with me. At one point the doctor was like, "Try to count a little more slowly." The counting was keeping him calm and before we got to twenty, she had retrieved the ball!

We called David to tell him the good news and he told me he had been praying really hard. I wasn't surprised to hear this because at the moment Ezra laid down for the last time, I knew it that ball wasn't coming out without some divine intervention, and I really couldn't believe it when she said it was out.

Best of all, even through all the flailing, his eardrum was still intact. I'm sure this was the most traumatic experience he's had in his short life and the whole time I was holding him down I kept flashing back to when I was three and a half and had to get stitches in my pinky toe, and the nurses had to strap me down and I remember not caring about my toe at all - I was just so mad and scared that they had strapped me down.

We got back home and all he wanted was David. They got some ice cream and talked outside for twenty minutes before David put him to bed.

[Ezra putting on a brave face, waiting to be called in to the doctor's office. You can see how puffy his eyes are already from crying earlier.]

[He was much braver than I've seen him about getting all the measurements - he had no idea what he was in for.]

[This is just after she got the ball out. You can see it on the napkin to the right of his head.]