Chalab Ez: Airsoft BB's and Ears Don't Mix

On Sunday night, Gil was on the floor with Talitha. She found a green Airsoft BB and the next thing Gil sees is Tally pulling her hand away from her ear. Sure enough, she put it in her ear. This was not an emergency as she was not in pain.

Later that evening, she fell asleep on the couch and then Gil and I started working to get it out of her ear. We tried sucking it out with a straw. Then Gil used the outside casing of a pen to try to suck it out. We attached a hose to the end of the pen and still we could not suck it out. We did try to glue the ink part of the pen to it that night and it did not work. After many attempts of sucking, we decided that we sucked at sucking and we gave up for that night.

Yesterday, Monday, I looked and it was still in her ear canal. But since she wasn't in any pain we did not do anything to try and get it out. Both Gil and I continued to think about ways to suck it out. One of my thoughts was to use my milk machine vacuum to suck it out.

Today, Gil brought the milk machine in and we tried to suck out the BB with it. It did not work. We tried some different modifications for the suction but since we didn't want to hurt her eardrum either we were very careful about the amount of vacuum used and tried it on ourselves before tryng it on her. We really needed a better end attachment to suck to the BB. There may have also been a suction between the BB and her eardrum making it need more suction than we were willing to use. When that didn't work, we decided to try to glue something to it again. This time though, Gil used alcohol to clean and dry the BB before we tried to superglue a stick to it. Talitha also fell asleep on the couch so she was still and wasn't moving around.

A few issues we needed to make sure happened. One, when using super glue, we needed to make sure the glue did not come in contact with her ear canal. We also needed to be able to see what we were doing. Here is what we used.

A clear outershell of a pen with some of the end cut off. We were able to stick the pen casing into Talitha's ear and have it reach the BB. We first used it to try and suck the BB out on Sunday. Please note that we were extremely careful not to push on the BB at all as we did not want to lodge it further in the ear canal or even possibly rupture the eardrum.

We used a wooden paint brush with the end of it cut off to glue to the BB. This paintbrush fit perfectly into the pen case so that as we inserted the tip with super glue on it there was no way it would touch anything but the BB. Talitha was a sleep and so she was not squirming which would have made it hard.

This picture shows how the paintbrush fit inside the pen casing.

We also had a otisscope with the light shining on the side of the pen casing which allowed Gil to see what he was doing. We prayed to the Lord asking that we would have success in getting the BB out this time. Then as Tally slept we inserted the pen casing into the ear so that it was just touching the BB. I shined the otisscope light on the pen casing, then Gil put the glue on the paint brush and inserted it down the pen casing to the BB. He held it there until Tally started moving and he pulled out both the pen casing and the paint brush and the BB was stuck to the end. Initially, Gil thought it didn't work because she started moving, but the Lord was gracious to us and allowed the procedure to work.