We happened upon a Oh! Susannah's doll and miniature Shop in the French Quarter and spent what felt like years in there. Doodle was picking her nose and kept saying, "The glass kind of tickles up there when I breathe." I had no idea what she was talking about, but I looked up her nose: dark and empty. At some point, Grandma heard what she was saying and pulled me over with eyes the size of saucers.
Apparently, before entering the store, Doodle had picked up a tiny piece of glass off the sidewalk to show Grandma. She told her to drop it, but Doodle thought it would be more interesting to shove it up her right nostril! Staying calm, I got a Kleenex and told her to blow. Nothing.
Plugging her other nostril I asked her to pretend she was swimming and needed to clear out her nose, to please blow. She got silly saying, "I can't blow because the glass is too tickly". Panic set in.
Memories of tweezers the size of salad tongs ran through my head of a past doctor visit when Doodle was about a year old: she'd shoved a "dot to the lowercase i" up her nose from a puzzle we had -- never to be found. Another memory surfaced of those tweezers going up Peanut's nose when she was about 2 years old: she'd shoved a tiny marble up her nose which finally came out with massaging and a big sneeze, thanks to a can of pepper I dumped in her lap. And then a different kind of memory came forward: the afternoon a silver barrette (minus the flower) mysteriously showed up in Peanut's diaper when she was about 18 mos.; is it possible to safely pass a tiny piece of glass, I wondered?
Trying desperately to avoid the New Orleans E.R. from becoming a family affair, I pinched Doodle's other nostril and firmly told her that she had to blow. "Too tickly," she insisted, followed by a fit of nervous giggles. Fortunately, her giggling made her snort, and, "Voila!" Out popped a much bigger piece of brown glass than I'd anticipated, landing directly on my finger.
Grandma and I took several deep breaths while our heartbeats slowed, and asked each other in a fleeting glance, "What could possibly happen next?"
Oh my gosh! I remember a daughter of a friend getting a piece of glass stuck up her nose, but it had to be surgically removed. Lucky you.
ReplyDeleteHoly crap. That's all I have to say.
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