‘There’s a what in your nose?’

Last updated: 28/10/2015 10:30 by MichelleMcDonagh to MichelleMcDonagh's Blog
Filed under: MummyBloggers
 
The last time my sister and her adorable almost four-year-old twin boys came to visit us from Dublin for the weekend, we ended up in the doctor’s surgery on the Saturday morning.
 
My most accident prone nephew had split his eyebrow after hurtling head first into the corner of our glass-topped coffee table.
 
Last weekend, they came to visit again and once again, we ended up in the doctor’s surgery on Saturday morning, this time with my middle child. Starting to notice a bit of a trend here.
 
It was all very calm and peaceful with five cousins aged six and under sitting at the kitchen table making Halloween masks out of paper plates. The Bruiser (5) was up to his eyes in stickers, glue and glitter when disaster struck.
 
“Oh oh! Mom.” There was panic in his voice and his eyes.
 
“There’s an eye in my nose.”
 
“There’s a what in your nose?”, I asked, thinking the kid had really lost it this time.
 
“An eye, a googly eye,” he wailed.
 
“Oh for feck’s sake Jake, what on earth did you put a googly eye up your nose for?”, I wailed back at him, panicking the poor child even more.
 
“Mommmmy,,” he wailed louder.
 
His siblings and cousins began to back away from the table, afraid that his plight might be infectious or that there might be blood or guts involved in the inevitable extraction procedure.
 
“OK, just calm down now,” I said, more for myself than the child, as worst case scenario images of the plastic eye being sucked into his brain (is that even possible?) or down his throat filled my mind.
 
The eye wasn’t lodged too far up his left nostril so I told him to sniff it down.
 
Instead he snorted it up.
 
“I said down, not up,” I shrieked, panicking everybody even further. OK, so it wasn’t my finest moment.
 
In his panic, the poor Bruiser kept sniffing the eye up his nostril until it was almost out of sight. At this point, Princess Firstborn was crying, not in sympathy, but because she was afraid there might be blood and the Baba was wailing because her brother wouldn’t stop wailing.
 
I bundled the patient into the car in his pyjamas and raced over to our local GP surgery.
 
“I think I can safely say this is a case you won’t have come across before,” I told Dr Andy. “He has an eye stuck up his nose.”
 
He looked at me somewhat perplexed until I showed him another googly eye I had brought with me.
 
“Did you try the pepper trick?,” he asked. This was the first I had heard of trying to induce a sneezing fit by getting the child to sniff pepper.
 
Dr Andy tried to remove the eye with a long tweezers, but it was proving very difficult to get a grip on it, coated as it was in snot. The Bruiser was beginning to get agitated. The doctor tried again with the tweezers and the nose started to bleed.
 
Then just as I was envisaging hours spent waiting in A&E, The Bruiser started to sneeze and glory be, the googly eye shot straight out into my hand.
 
The next time, I’ll try the pepper trick.
 
Michelle McDonagh is a freelance journalist working from Blarney, Co Cork. She’s a mum of three children aged 2, 4 and 5, and a firm believer in 'good enough' parenting, bribery and the healing powers of chocolate.
 
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