Early, early Thursday morning. 3:00 a.m. to be exact. I woke up from a sound sleep by the sound of scratching in my right ear. Wassap wit dat?

I listened for awhile. I tilted my head. It didn’t go away. I thought I must have had water in my ear, so I kinda jiggled my ear to make it stop. No luck

Suddenly, visions of something I’d seen on TV (I think it was on a program debunking all the urban legends) flashed into my mind. The one about how this worm tunneled from this guy’s ear into his brain and began to eat it all up. Can that really happen? Nah, right? But the noise continued and I was getting scared. Eh, it was the middle of the night!

So I woke up Nolemana and asked him to get a flashlight and check to see if he could see anything. He couldn’t. But he reminded me of the time I had to take him to the ER because he had something in his ear and the ER doc used these special forceps-y thing to pull a gnat out. Nolemana thought we should go to the ER. I didn’t want to. I felt stupid going for something lidat.

But the noise didn’t stop. And I kept thinking about that worm boring its way into my brain. I’m already pupule…no need more pupuleness by losing half my brain to a dumb worm! The noise was driving me crazy[er]. I could actually picture the little buggah inside my ear, chewing away, like a cow with her cud. Chomp, chomp, chomp… eh, show me da way to her brain!

I still felt stupid, but changed into daytime clothes and off we went. On the way there, right in the middle of the road in our semi-rural area, was this beautiful doe, just standing there. I stopped the car and we just sat and watched her for quite a while. (Nobody else on da road so was okay.) Then she hurried into the bushes and on we went.

Just after I parked the car and we got out the noise stopped. I stopped too. “Eh, da noise wen stop! I no like go in!” I told Nolemana. So we just stood there; then it came back again. The bug was back. So in we went.

Amazingly, no one was in the waiting room. I got out the sock I’d been knitting on earlier in the day and began knitting. It helped to calm me down. I’d only gotten a few rows done when I was called in to the nurse’s place, where she took my blood pressure and stuff lidat. Then we went into the exam room. It had only been about ten minutes.

I started knitting on my sock again, but it wasn’t long before the nurse came in, and on his heels, the doctor. He looked into my ear and said I had water behind my eardrum and that’s what was causing all the noise. Wassap wit dat? Water can make all that much noise?

I sheepishly told him I’d been afraid that there was a brain-munching bug in there. He laughed and told me that it wasn’t possible for a bug to do that, but “Hey, have you ever seen Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan? There’s this worm that gets into their brains and begins to control all of them! It’s a great movie!”

Um, ‘scuse, eh? Here I am barely past the bug stage and you’re telling me that? He laughed. “Great movie”, he said again. Then he told me I could use a decongestant and the eventually the water would drain into the eustachian tube and the bug would stop chewing noise would stop.

So we left and got in the car and drove home. By this time it was about 5 a.m., and we were amazed to see a couple out walking their dog! Who walks their dog that early in the morning?

When we turned East, I could see Jupiter bright and huge and shining up there in the sky. I felt glad that we were there to see it; we can’t see East from our house because of the hill and all the tall fir trees. But because of the bug water in my ear, there it was, a truly amazing sight.

Ordinarily I’m not awake at 3-5 a.m. I wasn’t glad to be woken up for the middle of the night sojourn, but seeing Jupiter like that gave me a whole new perspective on what I”m missing.

So my brain is okay. There was no bug. I had knitting in my car to help me get through the waiting time.

Life is good.