Rhino-barbieshoe-ectomy successfully completed. Patient is recovering nicely. Tweezers in garbage.
Mundane, pointless, thought I’d share.
Where did the barbie shoe fit in? - Ah, got it - the rhino part was (I hope) a child’s nose (not your own).
Your rhino stepped on a Barbie shoe? How could you tell?
The patient: a 2 year old male
The culprit: a Skittles candy, green
The procedure: “Did you stick a Skittles up your nose? Did you? Did you? Here, let me look with this light…”
The outcome: negative for presence of Skittles, green
The ER bill: $650
:smack:
You know those colorful plastic magnetic letters that stick to your fridge? Know those little magnets in the back of them, about the size of a raisin? When my sister was a tot, she discovered that they fit quite nicely up her nose. More than one rather disgusting extraction had to take place.
–
I once saw a comic do a bit about his little brother sticking Cocoa Puffs up his nose . . . to the impaction point. How to get them out? Big brother to the rescue: he grabbed little brother’s nose and squeezed it half a dozen times (to crush the Cocoa Puffs). Little brother started to cry – and CHOCOLATE SYRUP STARTED RUNNING OUT OF HIS NOSE! 
:barf:
TheKid stuck an orange TicTac up her nose when she was three. We’re driving home, suddenly I heard “OW OW OW” and the sounds of crying from the back seat. Looked in the mirror to see flourescent orange snot bubbling from her left nostril.
I pulled over. Tried to get her to blow her nose, didn’t work. I did have long fingernails, though. What you do for your kids. I had to stay pulled over for a bit longer, until I quit crying with laughter.
The kid who loved across the street from me when I was little stuck some of the beans from her Don’t Spill the Beans game up her nose. She ended up having to have surgery to have them removed.
So what does the ER do in this situation? Special prescription-only longer tweezers?
Well, they might have, had they been able to spot the Skittle. As it happened, they kept him for about an hour under observation, then shrugged and said, “Well, if he did stick it up there, it probably dissolved and slipped down his throat the back way.”
In other words, they did nothing.
The neighbor kid (6 y.o.) came home from a visitation weekend with a tree bud stuck in his right ear, and mom wanted me to get it out since I’m the neighborhood EMT.
We took him to the rescue station, where I got a 20 gauge IV catheter, a saline flush syringe, and a pair of forceps. His eyes got real big when he saw that catheter, too… him->:eek: Anyway, I pulled the flexible catheter off the needle, and stuck it on the end of the syringe, and he relaxed to see I made a squirtgun. I had him feel the end to see it wasn’t sharp, and he relaxed a lot.
I had him tilt his head to the side, and told him to sit real still, even when the water squirts, because it will be the funniest feeling he ever had. He was a trooper, and just flinched a bit. The bud came out to the point that I could grab it with the forceps, and pulled. Total time was about 20 seconds, not counting setup.
ETA: My Amish grandmother’s favorite way to say good-bye to the grandkids: “Don’t stick any beans up your nose…” I use the aphorism to this day.