The Morning I Heard Pepita Die

“Do you see anything? What is it!? Just open it up, pull on it and look in there!” I panicked as Chris looked in my ear at 5:30 am, our first Sunday morning meant for sleeping in after an exhausting week of training. He looked in my right ear, not seeing anything abnormal. I heard the friction of movement in my ear. “There’s something in there!”

“It may just be your sinuses,” he said. No, this is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Something’s wrong.

“But it jolted me from bed, something went in there. My God, what should I do!?”

He grabbed the flashlight and pointed it in my ear. Nothing. My ear was going raw from too much rubbing and squeezing…it was the only thing I could do so I wouldn’t hear the bug that I know was in there. He flashed the light in my ear again. “Ooooh yeah, I see the little butt of a bug.” Sh*t, sh*t, sh*t, sh*t, I thought. My worst bug fear is coming true; there’s a f****** bug in my ear.

Deep breaths, deep breaths; don’t think about it too much, don’t freak out. For some reason, I took slight comfort in knowing that it was a bug and not some unnamable phenomenon. “Ok, I’m gonna call Medical.”

*LIFE LESSON: How to kill a bug in your ear* According to the Peace Corps 24/7 emergency on-call physician (they’re freaking awesome, by the way), there was no danger in having this little son-of-a-gun in my ear. My ear was at no risk of infection or any other morbid thoughts that were running through my head. I needed to kill it though and nothing else. Forget the Q-tip, hair pin, or anything else that could injure your ear. Chris poured 3 – 5 drops of almond oil (could be any oil) in my affected ear and I waited at least 5 minutes. I heard it die. It sounded like the end of a Nirvana song, where the final electric guitar note slowly fades away into the background.

I then laid down, bug ear facing the bed, and prayed to all the gods for 20 minutes for the little sh*t to come out. It didn’t. The doctor said it may not come out. I would have to wait until Monday morning for the extraction with one of the Peace Corps doctors at the training center. I had to go about my first Sunday off, meant for handwashing clothes and some much-needed rest, with a stupid bug in my ear.

The next morning, the saint of the doctor shot solution in my ear, twice, to get it out. It was a cockroach! GROSS, EWW, QUE ASCO! It wasn’t a fluffy moth or a tiny mosquito; out of all things, it was a cockroach…the evilest of all bugs in my mind. Granted, it was a small one, but still. Thank goodness I didn’t know what it was this whole time.

“What are you going to name it?” Chris asked me that evening. Humm, something cute…Pepe

? Mmm, maybe Pepita (pumpkin seed), it kinda looks like one. RIP, Pepita. We laughed. Phew…

First Peace Corps blunder. One down, more to come…