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After suffering from pain on the right side of her nose for most of her
life, a New Zealand woman was shocked to discover a plastic board game
piece that had apparently been stuck in her nostril for 37 years.
Mary McCarthy, from Christchurch in New Zealand, had always struggled
with pain and breathing difficulties on the right side of her nose, but
having put up with it since childhood, she never bothered seeing a
doctor about it. But last October, following ab excruciatingly painful
nasal swab test for Covid-19, her nasal issue got even worse. Her nose
would be leaking constantly and she was in a lot of pain, so she finally
decided to get medical help.
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The 45-year-old woman saw several general practitioners who put the pain
down to a chronic sinus condition, but she wasn’t satisfied with that
verdict, so she decided to see an ear, nose and throat specialist.
Unfortunately, she could only book a checkup in August, but because the
pain had become so bad, she decided she needed help sooner, so after a
painful day’s work, she went to Christchurch Hospital’s emergency
department.
Luckily for McCarthy, the doctor on duty at the hospital believed it was
more than sinus pain, and asked her if she had ever put anything in her
nose that could have gotten stuck there. This question triggered a
memory of the woman playing tiddlywinks with her seven brothers and
sisters as a child, and putting the small plastic discs in their noses
to see how far they would go when they blew them out.
Only one time, 8-year-old Mary inhaled through her nose and sucked a
small “wink” in her nose. Not knowing where the small plastic disk had
gone and too scared to tell her mother about it, she just put it out of
her mind, and, as time went by, forgot all about it.
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A CT scan revealed that there was indeed something stuck in her right
nostril, but it didn’t look like a tiddlywinks piece. The doctor tried
removing it while she was awake, but it proved too painful so she had to
undergo an operation that involved pushing the mysterious object through
her nose and extracting it through her mouth.
It turned out that the object was indeed a small plastic wink, only with
years of calcification built up all around it. The doctor told Mary that
the Covid-19 swab test had dislodged it after nearly four decades and
caused an infection that amplified the pain she had put up with all this
time.
“I always had difficulties breathing through my nose over the years but
never gave it much thought,” Mary McCarthy told Stuff.co.nz. “There was
calcification around it and that was probably why my nose had grown a
bit crooked.”
This story is remarkably similar to one we posted last year, where a
59-year-old man in Zelenograd, Russia discovered he had been living with
a metal coin stuck in his nose for 53 years, after sticking it in there
as a kid and forgetting about it.
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