So, last night as I was getting ready to leave for a girls night with a few other moms in the neighborhood, we had a little adventure. Sawyer, who has never done anything with small pieces of food but actually eat them, decided it was time to try to fit a regular M&M up his nose. Sounds fun, right?
He did this, of course, as I was upstairs getting Xander up from his afternoon nap. I came downstairs to find him sitting on the couch (unusual in and of itself), with an rather odd expression on his face. He wasn't upset, but it was just a curious kind of look. And he was also attempting to suck a lot of air in through his nose, you know, as though something was clogging it. Thinking this was really odd, I quickly set Xander down and went over to check him out. He had red running down from one side of his nose. It appeared to be red M&M candy stain, which was the first bad sign. The second was that I thought I saw something inside his nose that looked like a hard white candy shell, you know, after all the red had run down his face. But by the time I could get the flashlight and the tweezers, whatever I saw was gone.
Realizing it would be useless to try to get something I couldn't see, I simply stuck the handle end of the tweezers inside his nose, trying to get a sense of whether that red was a little blood from either a scratch or random nosebleed, or whether it had indeed been red candy stain. The handle came back out with chocolate and red. It was also bleeding rather badly and continued to do so for about twenty minutes. And then . . . nothing. He appeared perfectly fine.
We decided an ER visit last night was unnecessary, as he was playing and breathing fine and even went to sleep without any trouble. We did turn the monitor on in their room for the first time in a long time, and he slept through the night and woke up in pretty good spirits this morning. There was a bit of dark mucus on the side in question, which made me wonder. We decided to play it safe and have him checked out by the pediatrician this afternoon.
Long story short, he appears perfectly fine. The pediatrician said it was extremely irritated and had a pretty good cut inside, which made her believe something had been in there but wasn't any longer - he either scratched himself getting it out last night or it had already drained through his sinuses. She didn't see anything with her magnified tool, and his breathing was good despite the congestion from a common cold that all three boys have right now - so we're just going to keep an eye out for any unusual drainage (dark green on one side only, is apparently the clue for a lodged object in the nose) and operate on the assumption that he's perfectly fine.
So, I was that mother today - the one who just couldn't be sure if her nearly three-year old had stuffed a piece of candy up his nose, and if he had, where it had gone to. At least we could bring a little holiday cheer to the pediatrician's office on a Friday afternoon, right?
