The $200 tissue
October 13th 2011 15:10
Yesterday, just as I had polished off a chapter of a memoir I was reading and about to go to bed, Jake came into my room and calmly informed me he had accidentally stuck a wad of tissue too far up his nose.
I blinked in disbelief. I had just removed my reading glasses, closed the book and had been about to turn out the light to go to sleep. It was 10 p.m. on a school night.
"Come here. Let me see."
Jake dutifully approached my bed.
"Which one?" I asked doubtfully after peering up his nose. "I don't see anything."
"That's because it's too far up there," he said, pointing to his left nostril.
"Jake, why did you put a piece of tissue up your nose?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. Jake gets so many nighttime bloody noses that if third parties were doing our laundry, they'd think he was a girl with a menstrual cycle. I don't even bother buying nice sheets anymore. I pick up used ones at Goodwill that he can bleed on regularly with impunity.
"I got a bloody nose and I pushed the tissue up there to stop it and I was twisting and twisting and it got stuck," Jake said, shrugging.
Sighing heavily, I took him to the bathroom, which has stronger lighting, and peered up his nose again. Still nothing. Just two tiny little black caves.
"Jake are you SURE it's still there? Maybe it came out when you pulled out the rest of the tissue?"
Jake shook his head emphatically. "No, Mommy. It was a little piece and it's still there. I can feel it."
I put a hand on my hip, pondering this most odd dilemma. Then it occurred to me we had saline solution in the medicine cabinet. I squirted some up the left nostril and ordered Jake to blow into a new tissue. He did, mostly through his mouth.
"Blow your NOSE Jake. Blow it really hard," I commanded.
He blew and blew and blew, for at least 20 minutes. Each time I examined the tissue contents. Snot, sort of pinkish from the remnants of the blood, but no tissue.
"Baby are you ABSOLUTELY SURE it's still up there, because I really think it's gone," I said, hopefully.
Again, Jake was adamant. "It's still there, Mommy. I can feel it."
I filed a finger nail to form a makeshift trowel in preparation for some serious digging, but realized when it was time to enter that my finger's circumference was too big to make the journey.
I decided to give Jake a little test. "Plug your right nostril and close your mouth and take a deep breath through the left nostril. Can you breathe?"
He obeyed and I didn't need him to give me the answer. It was obvious no air was getting through.
I told Jake to go back to bed but knew there was no way I'd be able to sleep until this was resolved, so I Googled 24-hour urgent care and the name of my city and was horrified to learn that my small town has no less than three 24-hour veterinary clinics, but not a single 24-hour urgent care for humans. All of the ones that serve PEOPLE had closed about 9 p.m.
That meant we'd have to go to a hospital emergency room, which seemed ludicrous for something that was not life threatening, and for all I knew was just a figment of a 6-year-old's imagination. I dialed the E.R. of the closest hospital for advice, and an automated greeting explained that hospitals may not dispense medical advice over the phone. If you have a life threatening emergency, come in.
Fine, I thought. I know someone who will help me.
At nearly 11 p.m., I called the home number of a colleague at work who is married to an emergency room physician. Her husband was actually at work, but she was gracious enough to gather all the facts and phone him there. Five minutes later she called back. Her husband said the tissue would have to come out one way or another because it posed an infection risk. I could go to an E.R. that night, when it would be easier to remove, or wait until morning when the urgent care opened, but the more time passed the more difficult it might be to extract.
Neither option particularly appealed to me. I had to work in the morning, and Jake had school. Plus it seemed to me medically I ought to deal with it sooner rather than later.
I went to Jake's room, woke him up, and said as gently as I could. "Sweetie, you're not going to get in trouble if you change your story. I won't be mad at you. I just need you to tell me the truth. Are you ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY CERTAIN that there's tissue up your nose? You're sure you can still feel it? Because if you can't, it's ok to tell me you can't feel it anymore. How does it feel?"
Jake, groggy and disoriented, nodded his head while he rubbed his eyes. "I still feel it, Mommy. I'm sure."
I pulled off my pajamas and put on some clothes, and went into my mother's room to wake her and bring her up to speed. Her light was out so I couldn't see her expression in the darkness, but her voice was incredulous when she uttered, "That boy! OK. Love you, baby."
I brought my book with me, and violated the lifetime ban on letting Jake play with his sister's expensive hand-held video game (he had dropped and broken a previous one), anticipating we'd be pretty far down on the triage list amid all the heart attacks, strokes and broken bones.
The wait was surprisingly humane. They got to us in about a half hour. The smirks on the faces of everyone who heard our story, from the clerks to the nurses to the doctors, were impossible to miss. One nurse was kind about it, at least. "Don't worry, buddy," he told Jake soothingly. "We've all done it."
The E.R. folks didn't have any better luck finding the elusive tissue than I did, but Jake was unwavering in his insistence so they ordered X-rays.
The lead X-ray apron placed over the family jewels to shield them from radiation was not at all comforting. I projected 20 years and imagined the pathetic apology to my daughter-in-law when she delivered a child with two heads. "I'm sorry, dear, that must have been the X-ray. It's kind of a funny story, actually. You see, Jake got this wad of tissue stuck up his nose..."
There was nothing on the X-ray. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Still, they wrote us a prescription for an anti-biotic on the off chance there was, indeed, some undetected foreign body up there. If later I should find my son can't breathe, come on back, they said.
The insurance co-pay for that will be $200. We got to bed about 1:30 a.m.
10-12-2011.
Post Script:
In fairness to my son's reputation I feel obligated to post an addendum. There actually WAS a wad of tissue up Jake's nose. It worked its way out all by itself at school today. Jake was very excited to share the news as soon as I got home from work. Go figure.
10-13-2011.
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