More Than Just Snot

Friday evening I was working in the office and Brandon typically puts the kids to bed by himself when I am working so I don't have to break out of my programming zone. Shortly after he finishes getting Zoey down I hear crying coming from upstairs. Her room is just above the office and I can tell the difference between my kids' cries so I was sure it was Zoey. I run upstairs to check on her and she is bawling her eyes out and spouting what sounds like gibberish to me. My ears were still a bit stopped up because of my cold. Brandon comes in and translates she says she has a bead in her nose. We turn on the light and  take a look and sure enough wedged up in her nostril is a red barrel bead. She's still weeping and wailing quite a bit and she's freaked out so she won't blow her nose. Not that even if she did it would unwedge it since she's not even very good at blowing snot out into a kleenex.

I tell Brandon to get some tweezers since it seems like I could pick it out myself. He returns with the pointest pair we have. I thought he would get the blunt scissor like ones we have. I try my best to pin her down to the bed and go in to the extract it and she jerks her head and I stab her in the nose with the tweezers. So now her nose is bleeding and the bead turned out to be bigger than I expected, the tweezers weren't going to get around it easily anyway. I then just told Brandon to take her to the Emergency Care center down the street. I gotta get back to work and Ian is sleeping anyway. Zoey is still freaking out about not being able to get this bead out of her nose. I'm pretty much laughing at this point. I know she isn't in any real danger but she can't seem to understand that, but I don't want to laugh at her out loud because it'll just make her more upset.

About 30 minutes and $100 later Zoey and Brandon come back sans bead plus two stickers and a lollipop. He said once she calmed down she was fine. They wrapped her up really tight but as soon as the doctor touched her she freaked out again. They inserted a catheter that makes a bubble on the end behind the bead, inflated it and it popped the bead right out. When she got home I asked her if she was going to stick anything else in her nose and she told me yes. hahaha. The next day she did say no though, maybe she just needed to sleep on it.

I was sure this day was going to come where one of my kids stuck something up their nose, but I kind of figured at this point it would have been Ian, not Zoey. Just goes to show, you never know what to expect with kids. For future reference, the ER doctor said we could plug the other nostril and blow hard into her mouth and it would produce enough airflow force to dislodge most things.