Diagnosis: Foreign body in nose

This is a Polly Pocket shoe next to a dime. The shoe was part of a pair that came with a Princess Aurora (of Beauty and the Beast fame) doll. We've always been very strict with Viv's use of this doll and only let her play with it when Gus was asleep, so that he wouldn't get it and try to swallow it. Turns out we worried about the wrong child doing something foolish with it.



This is Viv with above pictured Polly Pocket shoe inserted rather deeply into her nasal cavity:




So, here's the story. Yesterday afternoon we we're planning on going to lunch with Pod and Ya-Ya at 1:30. Around 12:30 or so Gus was sleeping and Viv was playing with Princess Aurora and her tiny blue shoes when all of the sudden she started howling and grabbing at her nose. For some reason only Viv can explain, she had stuck the shoe up her left nostril then proceeded to shove it all the way up in what was probably an attempt to get it out. It was so far up that it took a flashlight to see it.

We rushed her out to the urgent care clinic in Chalmette and waited for several hours to find out that they didn't have the tools to get it out. This is Viv on (unsuccesful) attempt 1 at shoe removal:



Since they couldn't extract the shoe down here in Chalmette, we packed up Viv and headed to Children's Hospital uptown. They were really great and managed to get Viv in pretty quickly. After a second round of being strapped down to a spine board and held firmly in place, the doctors (plural) were able to insert a small balloon catheter behind the shoe and yank it out. Viv was a bit traumatized but all in all was quite brave.

I feel bad for Princess Aurora though, cause she's gonna have to go barefoot from now.