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Adventures in Nasal ExtractionNot every parent has to take their child to the emergency room to have things extracted from a nostril. For those of you who have been deprived of this joyous experience, you can now read about my experience. This story may not be for the squeamish.
Link was somewhere between 18 months and 2 years. He’d had kind of a rough day and a runny nose, so in the afternoon I snuggled him into my lap and rocked him to sleep. Once he was out, I tipped him into a more reclined position and was having a tender moment looking at him when I noticed that there was blue inside his nostril. Blue is not a color I associate with “healthy nostril” so I took a closer look. Yup. Definitely blue. I called Howard in for a comparative opinion. He thought it was blue too. He fetched a flashlight and we were able to determine that it was shiny blue.
That was when I remembered the Christmas beads. A month or two previously I’d bought a garland of blue pea-sized beads for our Christmas tree. Only, they never stayed on the tree. They were constantly played with and so I gave up and declared them a toy. They became one of those despised toys that I really want to get rid of, but the kids enjoy so much that I don’t actually do it. Then Kiki-of-the-scissors rendered the garland of beads into individual beads. I scooped up the pile and declared them trash. End of problem, or so I thought. Apparently I’d missed one. Link hadn’t. Link was a child with an automatic hand-to-mouth reflex for small objects. Only this time he missed his mouth. Maybe he was in the mood for something different. Whatever the reason, a blue Christmas garland bead was wedged firmly and deeply in his nose.
I took a moment to reflect on the runny nose that had begun a couple of days before and realized that not only did my child have a bead up his nose, he’d probably had it in there for days. Howard and I determined that, despite the fact that the bead had been there for days and not done serious harm, it really needed to be removed and we weren’t really equipped for the process. So Howard stayed home with Kiki and I bundled sleeping Link into his carseat and went off to the Emergency Room.
There is nothing quite like the experience of sitting down in front of an emergency room triage nurse, who is obviously gauging the newcomer for signs of blood or distress, and saying “Hi I’m here because my baby stuck a bead up his nose.” The nurse, bless her, didn’t laugh at me. She stayed extremely professional and asked questions about how long ago it happened and what my insurance company was. Then she disappeared into the back. She probably went back there so she could laugh, but she was straight faced when she came back and had me take a seat in the waiting room.
Link was awake by this time and happily exploring the waiting room toys when they called us back. Little did he know what awaited him. They took us to a special room that I’d never had to take a child into before. (Seems like I’d been in every other room in the place.) It had a chair which bore a significant resemblance to a dentist’s chair. A nice RN then kindly explained to me that this kind of thing happens often enough that there is actually dedicated nasal extraction equipment. It is essentially a miniature vacuum cleaner. The goal is to achieve suction on the foreign object and gently pull it from the nasal cavity. Note all the big words. Medical people can’t say things like “Oh yeah, we’ll just suck that bead right out of your son’s nose.” It wouldn’t sound nearly expensive enough.
Since we were all fairly certain that Link was not going to find this a pleasant experience and since it was pretty important not to accidentally damage his nasal cavity with random jabbing, we enlisted extra people to help restrain the poor kid. 5 people. It took 5 people to hold one toddler still enough to poke around in his nose. He screamed, they held, I attempted to reassure, and the bead failed to come out. The fancy nasal extractor was unable to get enough suction on the smooth, round, tightly wedged bead to pull it out. We took a break while I held my sobbing boy and discussed options. One option was to attempt to push it all the way in and extract it through the mouth. No one was keen on that. We decided to take a closer look with a light and special expensive tweezers before deciding how to proceed. So we went back to the holding and the screaming. Then there was a ray of hope. The examining RN said “It looks like there might be a string attached.” He grabbed the string with the expensive tweezers and gently pulled the bead right out. Thank you Kiki for leaving the dangling bit of string.
The bill for bead-up-the-nose extraction came to $500 (billed to my insurance company, just me and my bead driving up prices for everyone.) The RN offered to let me keep the bead. I declined.
Epilogue:
A few months after the bead-up-the-nose incident, Link was helping Kiki with her craft kit and I noticed him with a finger in his nose. Being sensitized to this sort of thing, I upended him and checked. Green. Fortunately it I could also tell that it was a mini-pom-pon about the size of a pencil eraser, easy to grab and extract without an emergency room visit. I called Howard and collected the tweezers. I held Link down and Howard pulled out the pom-pon . . . and another and another and another and another. Link had 5 of the things up one nostril, 2 up the other. Mini-pom-pons have never entered my house since.
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