rock up the nose

 

It all started Wednesday night, when we went on a walk down the trail along the creek by our house.  The girls enjoyed finding rocks to throw in.  Tessa and Sophie both found “diamond rocks” which were white rocks that had a bit of a sparkle to them.  Sophie choose to throw hers in, but Tessa wanted to bring hers home.  For the next couple days Tessa held her diamond rock a lot and showed it to anyone who would listen to her.  She even slept with it!

Well, disaster struck on Friday night.  Tessa was coming out of her room for 1 of several potty trips before she went to sleep, when I saw her putting her diamond rock in her nostril.  “No Tessa, we can’t put things in our nose!  That is yucky and it could get stuck, then we would have to go have the doctor get it out and that would hurt!”  I warned her as I took it away and placed it on the counter.  I put Tessa back to bed and closed the door.  Not even 10 min later she was crying in her bed, Dan went in this time and brought her out to me because she was freaking out about her nose hurting.  I went over and checked the counter… the diamond rock was missing!  The little stinker must have snuck out of her room, got the rock and shoved it up her nose!!  She was just so determined.  Unbelievable.

We tried to get her to blow her nose to see if it would come down enough for us to safely get it out.  She couldn’t do it, she was so distraught.  You could see the bulge and feel the rock up by the bridge of her nose.  So we decided that I would take her to the ER at the Children’s Hospital and Dan would stay home with Sophie.  On the way to the hospital I decided to pull out our insurance card at a stop light to check our ER benefits since we haven’t been since we switched insurance.  It was bad, we would have to pay 40% AFTER the deductible of $750… so I decided to reroute to the afterhours urgent care which just required a $45 co-pay.  Unfortunately it was on the other side of town.  But Tessa was calm now and doing fine, she kept saying, “The doctor will fix my ow-ee nose?  Take my diamond rock out?  It’s too far huh?”  I kept asking her to not touch it or sniff her nose, I was afraid she could sniff it into her lungs or something.

Once we got to the pediatric urgent care we were quickly taken back with a nurse to evaluate her condition.  After taking her vitals she said that the first thing to try was blowing it out.  I told her we had already tried at home to get her to blow it out but she didn’t understand and wouldn’t really try for us.  But this clever nurse had a different idea:  she held the clear nostril closed and one of Tessa’s arms for me, I held her other arm down and was instructed to blow into her mouth (like mouth to mouth)!  Weird huh?  I was scared to blow too hard and hurt her, but the nurse encouraged me to blow pretty hard.  I told Tessa that I was going to give her a kiss (a weird one) and after the first blow we could now see the rock up in there!  So I did it again and brought the rock down to the bottom of her nostril where it was easily fished out with a little plastic stick.  Who knew you could blow your own kids’ nose?  Not me.  Apparently it’s pretty common for kids to put things up their noses, and in their ears.

I would have loved to go home then and get my tired Tessa into bed but the nurse said that they would still like to triage her so the doctor could check her out and make sure no damage had been done.  I reluctantly agreed.

Tessa was the joy of the office, the nurses were all oozing over how cute she was. (I don’t think they are used to having such happy kids in the urgent care.)  The rest of the kids were really hurt or sick and crying, poor babies.  But Tessa was happy as a clam to play in their play house, read their books, sit in all the waiting room chairs, watch the movies, eat fruit snacks and sing songs.  I had a few people ask me what she was doing there, when she looked so healthy. :)  And she was fine, we waited 2 hours for the doctor to tell us that she was fine, no damage and nothing else up there.

I just hope she didn’t have so much fun than she doesn’t something else stupid to get back there anytime soon.  But we’re glad it wasn’t a big deal anyway.  The doctor thought I would want the rock to bring home as a memento or something, I told her no thanks, Tessa has lost her rock privileges, especially one that is nostril-sized!  Tessa has brought up how the doctor took her diamond rock a few times, I hope she learned her lesson.  We were exhausted by the time we got in bed, which was around 1am, but grateful no one was hurt.  Have you or your kids ever done something like this?