When I was between eighteen months and two years old, my family was sitting around the table having dinner one night (as we often did). As part of dinner that night, we had vegetables. The vegetables we had were corn and peas, as you may have guessed based on the title of this post.
During the course of the meal, my mother noticed that I had come down with one of the stuffiest noses she had ever seen. This is significant as my mother is a nurse, and had probably seen her fair share of stuffy noses. Both my parents were completely puzzled as they examined me and tried to figure out what was wrong. I imagine them both scratching their heads, not sure what to do (not only is my mom a nurse, but my dad is an EMT as well).
In the mind of a two year old, I suppose that one facial orifice is as good as the next. My parents finally looked up my nose, and saw bright green on one side and bright yellow on the other. I had stuffed my vegetables up my nose!!! And it wasn’t just one or two pieces of corn or peas. My nostrils were packed full.
I would like to now pause in this narrative and give my two-year-old self an award. How in the world was I able to stuff a meal’s worth of vegetables up my nose without either of my parents noticing?! I can only conclude that I picked my nose a lot as a two year old and they must’ve just assumed that’s what I was doing. However, I was quite a clever two-year-old and was actually thinking about food storage instead.
Once they realized that I had stuffed my meal up my nose rather than down my throat, they were a little perplexed about what to do. As I am told, because I had packed the vegetables in there pretty well, they were not coming out easily. Naturally, they couldn’t just leave the food in there either. They considered taking me to the emergency room, but my dad thought it would be ridiculous to take his daughter to the ER for something that he could take care of himself. Ever the mechanical engineer, he thought, “If I take her to the emergency room, what are they going to do? They’ll use some sort of suction device to get the veggies out…” So my dad decided he would do the same thing.
After considering the suction devices available to him, he decided on the vacuum (as he probably didn’t have anything else he could use anyway). However, he didn’t want to just run the vacuum over my face, and hope that it would work. Instead, he disassembled a mechanical pencil, and used the hollowed external part of the pencil. He attached it to a funnel, and to the funnel he put the end of the vacuum. Then he took the other end of the mechanical pencil, stuck it gently up my nose, and turned the vacuum on. Voila! No more stuffy nose!
A couple of weeks ago when I was sick, I wish I had remembered this technique since I could not breathe at all. Perhaps it would’ve helped.
oh, your dad is so clever. I’m totally trying that next time. cuz stuffing crap up the nose is one of my children’s favorite pasttimes.