well now. today was a darn good day.
many years ago, when i was about two, i got a necklace for christmas. it was an orange bead necklace, neon (as was the popular style for children’s play jewelry at the time). strung on string, it likely would bear a ‘not child safe’ warning label these days. but when i was young, those things didn’t really exist… they tended to count on parents having things like ‘common sense’.
as it turns out, my mother didn’t have much of that. and so, for my second christmas, it received it as a present.
needless to say, it was broken within oh, roughly three minutes. beads everywhere. but as a two year old, this was hardly a bad thing. after all, things that move and are shiny are much more fun than things that stay on a string and can’t be thrown about the room.
eventually, i tired of playing try to ‘scatter all the beads to the four corners of the earth’ and took up an even more interesting game called ‘where can little fingers put such little beads’.
a two year old with roughly 15 beads is a dangerous thing. but i managed not to destroy the world. most of them were put harmlessly into the great grille of the floor furnace and thus, melted and returned to the great plastic bead in the beyond.
but one, one little bead, it was spared that horrific fate. spared it for another that was very likely worse.
where did that one little bead wind up? well i’ll tell you, my friends.
that one little, shiny, neon orange bead… well it wound up right in my nose.
apparently, i was fascinated by how small it was… i could put it in my mouth, but it was too small to stay there. and for some reason, i managed to discover that it seemed to fit right into my nostril. so there i put it. and when it wouldn’t go all the way in, i pushed it so it would.
this was how my mother found me… finger doing as instructed and shiny, neon orange bead well out of sight by the time she managed to pull my finger away from its duty.
and there it stayed.
for thirty-three years.
for thirty-three years, i have not been able to draw a full inhale though my left nostril. i never really knew why… just assumed my nose was crooked inside or something. no reason to ever have it examined.
so thoroughly had i had forgotten it was there that this was ‘the way of things’ right up until i had a horrific sinus infection at age thirty-five that resulted in my first visit to an ear, nose, and throat specialist. he was examining my ears, my throat, and when he went to look into that left nostril, i heard him gasp and say, “what the heck…?” and suddenly, i remembered.
‘it is an orange bead, isn’t it?’
“Why yes, it seems to be. How on earth did it get there?” so i told him the story. he proceeded to try and remove it, but after several attempts and a gush of blood, told me it would likely require surgery. it had been firmly lodged between the interior sinus wall and the cartilage of my nose. he wrote out the location on an Rx pad and handed it to me for future reference.
fast forward to today.
i was sitting here sneezing my head off… dizzy and eyes watering, i get up and stagger into the bathroom to grab some tissue.
i decide to inhale deep through my mouth and damn it, blow my nose like it mattered. i leaned over the sink and proceed. and scared the shit out of myself when i heard a decidedly non-organic ‘PLINK!’ in the porcelain bowl.
i looked down to find what i can only describe as something out of a horror film. but underneath it all, still and only slightly visible, the shiny, neon orange glimmer and from it, an immediate flashback to my second christmas and the foolishness of unsupervised babies. heh.
and for the first time in forty years, i can draw a full breath through my nose.
i choose to see it as a positive sign… getting rid of negativities and opening myself to being more fully alive. but then, i always did think too damn much. heh.
i considered showing you the pitiful thing… but in all honesty, that’s a little too grotesque for me.