The Battleship Debacle

A few days ago I had planned on blogging about Jeremy's finals and how hard he has been working as that was the most significant occurrence of the week, but last night all that changed. We had gone to Ben and Becca's house for dinner. As was typical, Quincy was not eating dinner, but playing with toys instead. Last night he happened to be playing with Battleship. Eventually, Merrick finished eating and wanted to get down and play with his cousin. All the adults were still finishing dinner, but Merrick was within eyesight and I was not really worried about him.

After several minutes of playing Merrick started crying and came to tell me his nose hurt. I started talking to him about what had happened and Jeremy went over to talk to Quincy. Quincy was saying that Merrick bumped his nose and Merrick was not really clear about what happened other than to say "Quincy did". A few minutes later Merrick's nose started to run from crying and when I wiped it he started crying again. I thought something might really be wrong so I laid him down on the couch to take a look at it.

Even though I knew something was wrong I definitely was not prepared for what I saw. At first I thought I saw blood around the inside of his nostril, but very quickly it dawned on me that it was not blood, but a red peg from the battleship game. Instantly all the adults became panicky. We tried to rub it out from the outside and we tried to get him to sneeze it out by having him sniff pepper. Ultimately we decided that it was not coming out and that we needed to take him to the doctor. Being that it was Sunday evening our only option was the Emergency Room and a long drive into downtown Portland to the Children's Emergency Room.

All things considered the ER visit was as smooth as could be. They started by having me try a technique call "the mother's kiss" where I plugged the unobstructed nostril, put my mouth over his, and blew a quick puff of air into his mouth. This dislodged the piece, but he immediately sucked it back up. The doctors were worried about him sucking it into his trachea so they did not want me to try again. Instead they inserted a tiny tube with a balloon on the end up past the peg, blew up the balloon and pulled the peg out.

I was a wreck the whole time, but Merrick was so brave. In the end we are not sure if it was Merrick who stuck the peg up or if it was Quincy, but my favorite part of the experience was when the doctor asked Merrick if he had done it and he said, "No Quincy did it". When she asked who Quincy was he said "He is a quack-a-roo head". That is my boy, being a joker even in a scary situation.