We had just gone grocery shopping and were on the way home with nary a care in the world save the terror of new parenthood. Our lovely daughter, only a few years emerged from the comforts of the womb was babbling away in the middle of the back seat where her child seat snuggly restrained her. She was hungry and told us as much. I pulled an apple out of the reusable shopping bag and handed it to her without removing the tiny sticker. I turned around in my seat just in time to see the peeled off sticker hanging precariously from her upper lip. The sticker was curled and aligned perfectly with her nostril. I immediately commanded her to blow her nose and NOT INHALE. As I reached to grab the sticker I watched in horror as she took a deep breath, through her nose of course, and inhaled the sticker right up her snoot. “OH SHIT!” I said to my wife. We arrived home and brought everything and everybody into the house. Once inside we tried everything we could think of to extract the sticker. My wife couldn’t see it when she looked up the baby’s nose with a flashlight and began to doubt me. We tried to get the child to blow her nose but she hadn’t quite mastered that level of bodily control and she kept inhaling more air which must have moved the sticker ever higher into her sinuses. Finally we called the nurse at the Poly Clinic. We got her on the phone and just as she was telling us not to try to use pepper to make her sneeze, my wife was blowing pepper in the baby’s face. The nurse said we needed to seek medical care or risk having the sticker lodged permanently in the sinuses due the rapidly dividing cells with which such young children are replete. We hopped back in the car and headed to urgent care. They were able to see us relatively quickly. During the wait my wife kept doubting that there was actually a sticker up her nose since she didn’t see it being inhaled and she couldn’t see up our baby’s nostril. This totally pissed me off. When we finally got in to the examination room with the doctor we held our child while the doc looked up her nose and confirmed there was something there. It took three adults to hold our baby still enough so that the doc could aspirate and then pull out the sticker with a pair of hemostats. It was an cathartic moment tinged with the validation of my observation that had been called into doubt. These kinds of medical experiences have a definite end and a definite release of pent up emotion and frustration because they have a definite end.
The Apple Sticker Up the Nose
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