La médica me miró la oreja y dijo que no era nada serio.

Médica is the feminine form of médico, meaning doctor / physician. Since the doctor in the sentence is a woman, la médica is correct.

In Spain, médica is perfectly standard. You may also hear la doctora in everyday speech, but médica specifically identifies her as a medical doctor by profession.

Here me is an indirect object pronoun. It shows who is affected by the action: the doctor looked at my ear.

So although English says she looked at my ear, Spanish often says, more literally:

She looked me the ear.

That sounds strange in English, but it is a very normal Spanish pattern with body parts.

With body parts, Spanish often uses:

• an indirect object pronoun: me
• plus the definite article: la

So me miró la oreja is the natural Spanish way to say she looked at my ear.

Spanish does this because me already tells you whose ear it is. Using mi oreja is possible in some contexts, but it is less natural here and can sound more emphatic than needed.

Yes. Mirar usually means to look at, but in context it can also mean to check or examine.

In a medical context, la médica me miró la oreja can mean that she looked at it carefully, as part of an examination.

Other verbs that could appear in similar contexts are:

• examinar
• revisar

But mirar is very common and natural in everyday Spanish.

They are in the preterite because they describe completed actions in the past:

• miró = she looked
• dijo = she said

The sentence is telling a short sequence of events:

1. the doctor looked at the ear
2. then she said it was nothing serious

That kind of completed past narration often uses the preterite in Spanish.

The accent mark in miró shows that the stress falls on the last syllable: mi-RÓ.

Without the accent, miro would be stressed differently and would mean I look.

Dijo does not need a written accent because its natural stress pattern already follows normal Spanish pronunciation rules: DI-jo.

Also, médica has an accent because the stress is MÉ-di-ca, which does not follow the default rule for words ending in a vowel.

After decir when you report what someone said indirectly, Spanish normally uses que:

• dijo que no era nada serio

This is called indirect speech.

In English, we can also do this:

• She said that it wasn’t anything serious

Spanish uses que very naturally here. You could also have direct speech, for example:

• La médica me miró la oreja y dijo: “No es nada serio.”

But the original sentence uses indirect speech instead.

Era is the imperfect of ser. Here it describes the condition as the doctor presented it at that moment: it wasn't anything serious.

Why not es?
Because the reporting verb is in the past: dijo. Spanish often shifts the tense back in reported speech:

• direct: No es nada serio
• reported later: dijo que no era nada serio

Why not fue?
Because ser in the preterite usually sounds more like a completed event, while era is better for describing a state or condition. An illness or problem being serious or not serious is treated as a description, so era fits better.

Nada serio means nothing serious or not anything serious.

In Spanish, after words like:

• algo
• nada
• mucho
• poco

the adjective usually comes after the word:

• algo interesante
• nada raro
• nada serio

So nada serio is the normal order.

Yes, grave is also very common in medical contexts.

• no era nada serio = it wasn’t anything serious
• no era nada grave = it wasn’t anything serious / severe

Both are natural. Grave can sound a little more specifically medical or more strongly focused on severity, while serio is very common and everyday.

This is a very useful distinction:

• oreja = the outer ear, the visible part
• oído = the inner ear / hearing / ear as an organ in some contexts

In everyday speech, people do sometimes use oreja broadly, but technically oreja is the outer part.

So in a medical sentence like this, la oreja suggests the doctor looked at the ear area, probably the outside or the ear generally. In other contexts, especially if talking about hearing or the inner ear, oído may be more appropriate.

Yes, but only if la oreja has already been mentioned or is clear from context.

• La médica me miró la oreja = the full version, with the noun
• La médica me la miró = la replaces la oreja

So me la miró means something like she looked at it for me / she looked at my ear.

In the original sentence, using the full noun la oreja is more natural because it is introducing that information clearly.