The Q-Tip Accident

Being a parent these days is tough work. With Social Media everywhere Mom's get attacked for the littlest of mistakes. I don't know about you, but I feel like I have to be the perfect parent. I feel like if my child isn't where someone else's child is then I am doing something wrong, I am failing as a parent. I am here to tell you to relax and take a deep breath. You are doing a great job, your child is progressing as they should, and as far as being a great parent, you are rocking it. I am going to share one of the times that I felt like the worst parent in the world, because of a simple mistake. I learned from the mistake and after being hard on myself for so long, I made sure that it wouldn't happen again.

My son who is now 10, was 2 years old at the time. He had gotten into the q-tips and was playing with them in his ears. He had removed the q-tip from his left ear, but still had a q-tip in the right ear. I did not see the q-tip and came up behind him and scared him. He jumped and in doing so jammed the q-tip in his right ear further down. He started crying and his ear started bleeding. I of course freaked out and called the on call nurse at the time. It was the weekend and his doctors office wasn't open. She asked what had happened and if the ear was still bleeding. I told her the story and said that it had stopped bleeding and my son wasn't crying anymore. She told me to keep an eye on it and bring him in first thing Monday morning. On Monday morning we go in to see his doctor. I told her what had happened, told her that he hadn't complained about it since and it never bled again. She looked in his ear and said that everything looked normal. She told me that she could see a little bit of dry blood, but other than that there was nothing out of the ordinary. She said if he complained about it, to bring him back in. We went home and that was that, or at least I thought. 

Over the next few months my son kept getting ear infections. I took him in every time he complained about his ears hurting and they would look in his ears and say that he had an ear infection. It wasn't until about the 5th month that we saw a resident doctor. We came in because he was complaining about his ears hurting again and I asked her to look really good in there. She looked in his left ear and said that it did look a little red, and then she checked his right ear. She got really quiet and was looking in it for a long time. She asked if he had any trauma to it lately. I told her the story of him jamming the q-tip in his ear, but we had it looked at by his doctor and everything checked out okay.

She informed me that everything was not okay and he was missing part of his ear drum! She told me that as she was looking into his ear she could see bone. I broke down at that point. As a mother I felt like I had let my son down. I felt like I had failed him those last few months, and felt like a failure as a parent. All of these questions started going through my head: " Why didn't the other doctors catch it?"-" What does this mean for his ear drum now?"- "Has he been in pain?" The doctor took a look at me and knew I was beating myself up. She reassured me that I had taken the right steps, it just hadn't been caught. She sent us in the way of an ENT doctor to see exactly how much of his ear drum was missing. After we left the doctors office I held onto my son for awhile in the car. I told him that we were going to fix his ear and hopefully get everything back on track. The back on track would take several years.

The next week we went and saw the ENT doctor. They looked at his ear and determined the he was missing 80% of his ear drum. He had gone 5 months without 80% of his ear drum! They told me my options were to get surgery on his eardrum to rebuild and repair it. He advised me that there may be some speech impediment because he had gone so long without the use of his right ear drum. I couldn't think about that just yet, I was still thinking that my son had to have surgery because of this accident. About a month after we saw the ENT doctor we walked in to have the surgery. My son being 2 he wasn't afraid of what was to come, I on the other hand was a mess. I am a bit of a hypochondriac and all the bad scenarios were going through my mind. Luckily I had my mom there to help me and keep me in check. The surgery went well, the ended up pulling a little bit of skin from above his ear and using that to recreate his ear drum. Once the surgery was done, we were told to come back and see them in a week and they would perform a hearing test. We went back the next week an his hearing was 100% in both ears. I broke down crying again because I was so thankful that he was able to hear out of that ear. They had also put tubes in his ears to help with the constant ear infections. We went home and I promised to put the whole ordeal behind me and move on. That was until I started hearing other 4 and 5 year old's talk.

Tytus was 4 and I could understand his speech, but I started to notice that other people could not understand what he was saying and I would have to do a lot of translating for them. It wasn't until I also heard other kids his age talking that I knew something was off with his speech. I took him to a speech therapist who agreed that his speech was behind and he had a muffled tone to it, almost like he was talking with lot's of cotton balls in his mouth. I told her the q-tip accident and asked if that could have contributed to his speech now. She informed me that it probably played a huge part because at the time of the accident, was one of the major times that children are learning to speak. We started going to see her twice a week for an hour. I could tell my son was improving, but I felt like he wasn't improving to where he should be. 

Fast forward and my son is now in the second grade. I am at a new school teaching and there is an awesome speech therapist at this school. I inform her of his speech problems and she tells me she will come in and listen to him. After she comes in and listens to him she informs me that he qualifies for speech and he has a stutter. I was shocked at the stutter part,because it wasn't a stutter that I was used to. She started working with him a few weeks later. I cannot begin to tell you how quickly he evolved after starting with her. By the end of second grade I was not having to translate for him anymore and he was more confident in his speaking. By 3rd grade his stutter was gone, and by 4th grade he had graduated out of speech. If you were to hear him today, you would have no idea that he had to endure 4 years of speech therapy. His teacher was beyond fantastic and I always told her how truly grateful I was for her.

This accident has kept me in check for the last few years. It showed me that something can happen in the blink of an eye and as a parent we always have to be on our toes. This accident also taught me that  we are human too and we can't be perfect all the time. When I see parent's beating themselves up over a little mistake I inform them that it is part of the process. We are their parents and we try with every ounce of our being to make sure they are safe. So remember next time something happens, you are doing the best you can do, and you are taking care of them like you should. Oh, and don't let your kids play with Q-tips in their ears!