I received a call from the principal at my three-year-old son’s school. No, he wasn’t in trouble (not in the conventional sense of the word “trouble” anyway). Nor was he sick or hurt. He was, however, fascinated by the colorful beads laid before him during an arts and crafts project. More precisely, he wondered in which orifices these beads, roughly the size of his sweaty little fingertips, might fit. His first hypothesis: A blue bead could fit snuggly inside his nostril. Success. It was time to really push the boundaries of this little experiment. Without a second thought he crammed a second bead into the same, already plugged nostril. Eureka! Moments later however, his delight would give way to concern and then a full-blown panic attack as he discovered some experiments are tough to undo. Kind of like trying to jam toothpaste back into the tube. When I arrived at school, his face looked like a contorted, slime-covered tomato. He tried to communicate with me but he was hyperventilating so all I could make out was: “D-d-d-da-daddy I-I-I p-p-pu-put a b-b-b-be-bead…” I saved him the trouble of completing the sentence party out of compassion and partly because listening to a sobbing kid attempt to sputter out a coherent thought is really irritating. So I casually interjected, “You put a bead up your nose. I know.” When I asked him why he did it he simply shrugged his shoulders and shook his head as if the question was absurd. I turned to his teacher and asked if anyone else in the class had attempted a similar antic. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head as if that question was absurd too.
I picked up my son and carried him to the sidewalk where I hailed a cab and headed straight to the pediatrician’s office. During the cab ride I pleaded with him to stop sniffing and insisted he breath through his mouth. Biology was never my forte, so in my mind the persistent sniffs could feasibly send the beads directly to his brain.
When the pediatrician finally saw us, she opened a draw filled with what appeared to be medieval torture instruments. Suddenly she approached my son holding a thin metal rod with a small loop at one end. The sight of this tool sent my son into the kind of frenzy reminiscent of one of the nutters in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. To be honest, the thought of that rod prodding around my son’s tiny nostril made me uneasy too. In spite of the doctor’s best efforts to subdue, distract and even entertain him, and in spite of my son’s penchant for sticking things up his nose, there was no way that rod was coming anywhere near his face. “What now?” I asked the doctor. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head as if the question was absurd. I was on a roll.
In a moment of desperation, I bear-hugged my son covering his mouth with my free hand, forcing him to exhale through his nose. He held his breath and struggled with what little energy he had left. Suddenly, he exhaled intensely, launching a thick glob of snot across the room as if it were springloaded. It landed on the floor with a splat. I released my grip and approached the snot, which resembled a jellyfish that’d washed to shore. I immediately noticed two brightly colored spots embedded in the gooey mass and used the doctor’s metal rod to prod around and confirm that it was, in fact, the beads. Mission accomplished. “Well done” congratulated the doctor, “Looks like you didn’t need my help after all.”
Today I received the bill from the pediatrician. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head. Absurd.
