Our darling 3 yo walked into the kitchen before dinner and announced that she “had put something in her nose at Poh-poh’s house today.” My wife was prepping dinner, and I was sleeping lying down on the couch.
DW: “You did? Oh-oh. You shouldn’t do that.”
the Comic: “I know.”
DW: “What did you put in?”
the Comic: “A screw.”
Something about the arc of this conversation wakes me. “Come here, honey,” I say.
The Comic dutifully trudges over to me. I look into her nose. Because I don’t have my glasses on, I’m not sure what I see there, but there seems to be a glint of something metal.
I am awake now.
I sit up and put on my glasses, and take a closer look. It’s a screw, still in my daughter’s nose. I can see the cross of the phillips head.
“Ok, honey, sit right here. Don’t move,” I instruct her, and bolt upstairs to look for a flashlight. “Honey, there’s a screw in her nose!” I call to my wife. “It’s still in there!” I’m trying not to let the panic that I feel in my heart escape into my voice.
I can’t find the flashlight.
Tweezers. We have tweezers, somewhere. I dash into the spare room to look through the bathroom supplies box. Grabbing the tweezers, I head back downstairs.
“Ok, honey, I’m going to try to get it out. You have to lie down, ok?”
The tweezer head is too wide. I can’t get it in.
My second attempt involves using my small electronics screwdriver set, which is magnetized, in the vain hope that it might stick on to the screw head and pull out. My daughter won’t have anything to do with it. Probably for the best, anyway. I might poke it in further, a big no no.
“Well, it looks like we’ll have to take her to emerg then,” I say to my wife.
Being the cool and collected medical person that she is, my wife suggested that we all eat dinner first, before she goes and takes the Comic to the hospital. Good idea.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“No,” the Comic says. I’m pretty sure it didn’t hurt, since she’s had it in her nose since the afternoon.
“When did you put it in your nose?”
“At Poh-poh’s!”
“I know, I mean, was it before your nap, or after your nap?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“Did you tell Poh-poh? Or Goong-goong?”
“I did tell Poh-poh.”
I don’t pursue my line of questioning further. Somehow I’m not sure that she really did tell anyone, because I think my mother in law would have a) told me about it when I picked them up or b) done something about it, like, oh, take her to the hospital.
After dinner, my wife packs up the Comic and takes her to the hospital. The Linguist, my 5 yo, stays with me and we play a game of Monopoly Jr., stay up much too late, and go to bed around 9PM.
I still haven’t heard anything yet. I can only assume they’re waiting, because you always wait when you go to emerg with something minor like this. I call my wife’s cell, but she doesn’t answer. No worries.
At 9:38PM she calls me back with the good news. It’s out, everything’s ok.
When they get home, I welcome them at the door.
“Is it out?” I ask my daughter.
“Yes,” she says, in a of-course-it’s-out-silly-daddy kind of way.
“Don’t do that again, OK?”
“I won’t,” says the Comic, “they threw it in the garbage!”
She’s totally not going to do that again. I know it.
postscript:
On the way home, my wife jokes with the Comic:
“We should have turned you upside down and gave you a shake before we went to the hospital!”
“Yeah!”
Hey, it seemed to work for Obama, why not me?
Today the Comic passed a momentous milestone: she’s tall enough to go into the IKEA Smaland playroom. W00t!
