Googly Eye

We spent Thanksgiving 2002 in Detroit. My Bubbie was sick by then, and we came to see her.

Madeleine was three. Predictably, our car was always filled with little kid things - Goldfish cracker crumbs littered the floor, empty juice boxes wedged between the seats, various scribblings and art projects done at daycare and left behind in the scramble to get in the house at night.

That next January Madeleine came down with a terrible cold. It dragged on and on and finally I gave in and took her to the doctor. She has always been particularly averse to having her ears looked into, but of course the doctor needed to see in there to check for infection.

The doctor removed her eye from the glass and looked at me. "There's something in there," she said. I didn't get it. What could be in there? "It looks like she may have shoved a little something into her ear," the doctor told me. "No way," I assured her. "Other kids, they may thrust peas up their nose or other things in other places, but not Madeleine. She's not mischievous like that." I really said that to her.

"There is something in there," the doctor told me. "And we need to get it out." She called in backup. Madeleine sat innocently on the table giving nothing away.

"Maddie, did you put something in your ear, honey?" I asked, though I knew what the answer would be. No, of course.

"No mama," she said.

Hmph, I thought. The doctor must be mistaken.

The backup came. They all agreed with the doctor. They wanted to irrigate her ear canal to get it out.

Maddie decided that she was having none of this. She started to cry and as water streamed into her ear, she got louder and louder, madder and madder. They finally gave up, doctor and backup. They wrote me a referral to a specialist, an ENT. When they left the room, Madeleine looked at me. Confession.

"Mama," she began, "remember when we went to Detroit to see Bubbie?"

"Yes, baby."

"I took an eye off a paper and put it in my ear."

Uh huh.

This is what happened as Madeleine eventually spilled all the beans: She was bored in the car on the ride home. There was a craft project she had made at daycare on the seat and she plucked a googly eye off it, stuck it to the end of an open tube of Chapstick and shoved it in her ear because she "wanted to see what would happen." She tried to get it out, but it just kept going further and further in. I asked why she didn't tell us and she said she thought we'd be mad. Am I that mean? It was a little funny. I asked her if she could hear the eye click in her ear and she said yes. That was a little funny, too. We drove right over to the specialist.

She wouldn't let him do anything either, and after 30 seconds flat he gave up and scheduled us for "surgery." They would have to put her under general anesthesia and get it out that way.

So, that's what we did. We brought Madeleine to the hospital early one morning, dressed her in a gown, took her to pre-op, had to live through her screaming all the way to the OR since they wouldn't let me go any further, waited in recovery til she woke up, got discharged, breathed a million sighs of relief and went out to eat breakfast in Oak Park where John Mahoney sat in the booth behind us and Madeleine had a giant temper tantrum about her eggs. Oh, and the doctor have us a little plastic jar with the googly eye in it, coated in wax, and sitting there so innocently. I promptly lost it.

"Not my kid, no way!" Yeah, right.