tl;dr if it stinks, there's something stuck in it

Last summer, the infink stuck a splenda packet up his nose. He clawed at it, grabbed my hands, and slapped at his nose until I got him to hold still. I got a pair of tweezers, picked a little ball of yellow paper out, and saw more farther up. We practiced snorting and blowing like a pair of congested ponies, and finally, just as I was suiting him up for a trip to the doctor's office, he sneezed the damned thing out. Cheers and photographs abounded. The child seemed cured.

Spoiler: he was not.

A few days later, he got a runny nose. It ebbed and flowed as the weeks went by, and we blamed the larger child for bringing home school grossness. We kept getting whiffs of garbage, and blamed the cats for having rank kitty breffs. When I got my poor little moles cut off, the drippy nose and the smell vanished completely. When they came back a few weeks later, we had a Dr. Google epiphany and realized that I had been on antibiotics, and he was still nursing a bit, and that meant that the smell was probably an infection. That fucking Splenda packet!

All of this led us to the Otolaryngologist's office yesterday afternoon.

Leif sat on my lap, trying to hide in my breasts from the doctor, who was wearing one of those big circular mirrors strapped to his head like an old-timey bonesaw.

I tipped his head back, the doctor prised his nostril open with silver pliers, and he said, "Yep, there's something waaay up there." He spritzed a medicated mist up his nose (the infink's) and ran off. Leif champed his teeth and asked for a tissue, certain that he was drooling all over his chin as the medicine leaked down his throat and made his mouth numb. He tucked the tissue to his nose and put his head on my chest while I sang a bit of Sea Wolf to soothe him. Nothing like a song about drowning the woman you love so she won't be shot to death to alleviate the tension in a room.

The doctor sat back down, trepidation all over his face. I pulled Leif's head back, wrapped my fingers over his eyes with one hand, and reached across his body to hold his arms down with my other. The doctor had to use both hands to open the nostril and insert the scary foot-long tweezers, which meant that one arm was smashed right up against my breast. We exchanged an eloquent glance which said, "Boob? What boob? This is science," and then, with a deft movement, he slipped the instrument up the infink's nose. Leif screamed in pain and arched his back, but kept his arms down with visible self-restraint, and then, POP! there was a horrifying grey wad of rotting paper at the end of the tweezers. "That was up your nose," I told the infink. He gave it a hard look. "Eew." And then, "Awesome."

Pulling something out of a toddler's nose and saving the day in under 10 seconds must be the best damned feeling a otolaryngologist can have on a Thursday afternoon. The doctor was really happy.

We pivot-flicky-kick'd to the toy drawer and let the infink pick out a plastic car. Leif sniffed, laughed, and then breakdanced everywhere we went for the rest of the day. Perhaps it wasn't just a Splenda packet he removed; perhaps it was a brain slug, or a nugget of Evil. I'm going to have to send that doctor a gift basket.

via

At the top of the basket: a box of Splenda. And my bra.