What Goes Up Must Come Down!

We've all had those moments when we've looked at one of our children and thought, "What were you possibly thinking?" I had one such moment last week when my three-year-old, Regyn, came home from a friend's house crying and pointing to her nose.

"What's the problem?" I asked, and then I got my answer when she threw her head back and I noticed a lime green bead halfway up her nasal passage. Of course I did what any sensible mother would do--I looked at her father and said, "Great. What are we going to do?" He had all the answers (as fathers usually do).

First, we tried plugging the other nostril and telling her to blow hard. She wasn't super cooperative and I could see this was getting us nowhere, so I decided to offer some assistance. The next time she blew I applied a thrust of pressure on the outside of her nose where I thought the bead was. Unfortunately, right after she blew her nose, she automatically sniffed everything right back up, and as you might have guessed, the sniff--along with the sudden pressure I applied--only served to lodge the bead further up her nasal passage. Now we needed a flashlight to see it at all.

Determined not to panic, we took a deep breath and tried a new approach. We got out a can of pepper, poured some in Regyn's hand and told her to sniff it very closely so she could see how good it smelled. She sniffed and sniffed and sniffed--nothing. So we took her down into our unfinished basement and began sweeping up a storm. Her eyes began burning from all of the dust, Dan and I were sneezing like crazy, but Regyn's nose must have been too plugged from the bead to be affected at all.

We were running out of options. We had tried all logical solutions; now it was time to try some irrational ones. Out came the vacuum cleaner. By this time, Regyn's level of cooperation was registering in the negative. She just wanted to be left alone, but each new attempt at dislodging that stubborn bead only made Dan and I more determined we were going to win this battle. I gratefully left to play volleyball and when I came back over an hour later, Dan looked dejected and Regyn was snoring on the couch. I was determined to not let her go to sleep with that bead up her nose. Visions of it making its way down her throat and into her lungs kept creeping into my head, so although two different doctors we called said it was not an emergency and to let her sleep, I had a hard time letting it go.

Dan had researched more options on the Internet while I was gone playing volleyball and said he had one more trick to try--the "kissing method." I was obviously desperate because I laid my sleeping child on my lap, plugged one side of her nose, and blew as hard as I could into her mouth, hoping to blow the obnoxious bead out. Much to my dismay, what came out was not the bead, but a whole lot of snot. I found my entire cheek plastered with the green, gooey stuff. Dan and I both tried this method a few more times, before I gave up, put my poor child to bed, and jumped in the shower to scrub my face.

There is a happy ending to this story--the bead did come out--but it took a doctor's office visit, three catheters, Dan and I holding our sweet child to the table while she screamed bloody murder, and many attempts by the doctor before it finally dislodged and plopped right in her open mouth, nearly choking her. The doctor had to run a catheter up through her nasal passage, blow a balloon up behind the bead, and then try to maneuver it back through, pulling the bead with it. It was traumatic, to say the least, but I can say that we all learned a very important lesson on what not to put where.

So, if you ever have a child decide to see if something will fit somewhere it doesn't belong, call me. I now know what works; more importantly, I know what doesn't. In fact, don't waste a call on me--call your doctor. It will save you hours of worry and stress trying your own techniques. And as for the bead, we kept it. Dan wants to make a necklace out of it as a reminder. I told him I never want to see anything green come out of a nose again, and that includes snot!