Up your nose with a....

peach bud?

I guess so. This isn't the ACTUAL peach bud Wade picked off the tree and crammed in his right nasal cavity yesterday evening at around 7:45, but this is exactly what it looked like. Don't panic: he didn't stuff a dime up there too. The dime is to show you the massive size of this 'nasal foreign body'.

After he did the deed, Wade came running inside the house freaking out, right behind Bella and cousin, Addison. Bella told me that Wade stuck a seed from a plant up his nose. I took a look, and sure enough I could see a little green object waaaaaaay up there. In my mind, it was the head from one of those dandelion stems that you pick to blow the white fuzzies. I asked Bella to go get me another one of whatever he jammed up there, and she brought me THAT, which I quickly slipped into my pocket. After ten minutes of trying to blow it out I ended up calling the doctor. Hooray for the pediatrician's office that has a doctor on call over the weekend so you can avoid the ER, right? Wrong. After about an hour more of blowing, the use of spooky-looking tools like this:

and plenty of shaking his head and bopping him on the noggin for laughs, the doctor informed us that he wouldn't be able to extract the peach bud because Wade couldn't hold still enough. The on-call seemed a little bit irritated at Wade, thinking the poor kid should be able to sit still. Give me a break, sometimes I can't even stand blowing my nose without a good shiver, let alone pulling a giant seed out of my head through my nasal cavity. A few minutes later we were back in the car, headed to the emergency room.

Many would find it surprising that, althought I have 6 children, 5 of which are boys and the oldest of which is 14, I have never been to emergency. As I'm walking in, I'm envisioning people bleeding and with broken limbs waiting four hours to see the doctor. I thought a peach bud in the nose would be low on the priority list so we'd be in it for the long haul. In reality there were only a few people there without any visual injuries. What the...? Here's Wade's smiling face as we waited...

and a picture of the area under attack, just because he looks so dopey...

We checked in with the nurse and were informed that the wait wouldn't be long. Each time someone asked me what was up there I would have to show them the peach bud for reference. I was very glad I'd decided to slip it into my pocket so they'd know what they were up against.

The nurse that checked us in put this tag on Wade's arm. It bugged him and he wanted to take it of until he decided it was his "ticket" to see the doctor:

After a few minutes we were taken to another nurse who took Wade's blood pressure and weight. Then we were led to a triage room to await the doctor. Nothing was on TV and Wade was BORED. What do you expect, 24 hour cartoons? Thanks a lot, Nick Jr. A training paramedic came in and I told him the story (this was probably my 6th time telling it, I was becoming a pro). Soon the doctor, who incidentally looks just like this guy:

came in and told us what I knew he would -- Wade would have to be knocked out and then they'd extract the peach bud. Soon we were moved into "Trauma B" which is an official operating room.

By that time it was about 11pm and poor Wade was getting VERY tired. I told him that he'd have to have a poke, then he'd go to sleep and the doctor would take the "seed" out of his nose. Of course, I'm terrified. My poor sweet 4-year-old has to go under general anaesthesia? Yikes! I was just praying that the doctors would know just what to do and he'd be safe through the procedure. I'd be allowed to stay in the O.R. for the procedure, so the nurse warned me that sometimes kids sleep with their eyes open or their eyes twitch because of the medicine so I wouldn't panic. I was panicked anyway.

Before the procedure, the doc wanted to try something. He had me plug the un-obstructed side of Wade's nose, then cover his mouth with mine, CPR style, and warned me that I would get covered with boogers. I blew a huge burst of air into Wade's mouth. No boogers (after all, we'd been blowing his nose for about two hours by this point), but no seed either. Apparently this works with a lot of crap shoved in a kid's nose, but doesn't work with an enormous peach bud. Now, aren't you glad you learned something today?

Wade was given a shot of Ketamine in his thigh... this is the medicine that puts you to sleep and makes you feel like you've lost an hour of your life. We're not talking about a tiny immunization dose either, we're talking about a huge syringe full. They jammed it into Wade's thigh and he cried for about a minute, then drifted off to sleep with his eyes open. The doctor waited until he was asleep, then used this to extract the seed...

So he takes this syringe, sticks the tube behind the peach seed, presses the button to inflate the balloon and eases the peach seed out of Wade's nose. Once he was knocked out, the procedure took all of three minutes, and that was after two tries. The doc then stuck a camera that looks like this:

up Wade's nose to make sure there were no extra pieces floating around in there. The biggest risk of having a foreign body in your nose is the risk of infection. Yuck!

So now for the long part, holding Wade's hand while waiting for him to wake up. Since his bedtime is usually 8:30, I wasn't optimistic about him waking up on his own at 1am. We had to shake him around several times before he lifted his head and became barely coherent, then we were able to finally check out.

Luckily, no adverse affects due to infection or the anaesthesia so far. What a relief!

I've been asking Wade all day.... "Should we stick THIS up our nose?" to which he replies, "NO! We don't stick things in our noses!" At least we seem to have learned a lesson.