Dh had a sore, itchy ear, was on the phone and decided to scratch the inside of it with the black bic pen (I know, gross). When he brought the pen out the end bit was missing, but he wasn’t 100% sure it was there in the first place. i had a look with a torch and couldn’t see anything.
He had ear problems before, and over those 10 years he had more recurring ear problems, he kept saying he could feel something in there, and at least 4 GPs looked in his ears, and each time he told them about the pen end theory and they would look and say there was nothing in there. He would get anti bs to clear it up.
He even had his ears syringed once at the gps and it wasn’t spotted. I would tell him to stop going on about the bloody pen theory as the GPs would have seen it, especially after the syringing!
No idea where the thing was hiding or how they kept missing it, maybe he has odd shaped ears, or the infections hid/disguised it, but one day he went to the nurse with another ear infection, she spotted it, two GPs looked at it unsure whether to remove, but one gave it a go, he brought it home in a sample bottle with a big “I told you!”