It's going into tricky ground, billing the kid for the medical bills for something idiotic he did. We had a not-so-nasty but similar incident with easy child 2/difficult child 2 - she was about 5 or 6 years old and had blocked ears. The doctor looked down her tiny ear canals, said he could see ear wax build up. They tried gently syringing, but no luck. The doctor didn't want to syringe too hard because she was so little. So we were given ear drops to soften the wax. Two weeks later after daily ear drops, we were back. The doctor tried syringing again. No luck. More weeks. More ear drops.
Finally we took her to a different GP, one who was more experienced. "Definitely ear wax," he said. "It's typical in colour. But I think I can see a tiny chink I can aim for with the jet of water; it takes courage but I've done this before."
He aimed, he succeeded - and exclaimed in shock - in the kidney bowl was some ear wax, but also one earwax-stained propelling pencil eraser! So when he syringed the other ear, he was not so surprised to find one there, too. Both erasers had been there long enough to take on the colour of the ear wax, so from the otoscope point of view, it looked like ear wax build up. But no amount of ear drops would have softened those erasers!
The thing is - when confronted with it, easy child 2/difficult child 2 could not remember how on earth those erasers got in her ears. She said she knew better than to put stuff in her ears, she was not a baby, she was FIVE, for pete's sake... {can anyone say, "Aspie!"?). To this day she cannot explain how the erasers got there.
If I had billed her for it all, she would object loudly because she really does not remember doing anything.
My theory - I think one afternoon at school, while bored, she got two propelling pencils and stuck them in her ears, tip outwards, and paraded around saying, "I'm an alien." and when she pulled them out, the erasers stayed behind...
Mind you, that is one possible explanation. But I cannot think of how a length of electrical wiring could have ended up inside someone's bladder, without them actively and meticulously feeding it up there... I mean, he can't claim he fell over into a box of electrical supplies!
Marg