Woman Spends Nearly 40 Years With Plastic Coin Up Her Nose, Finds Out About It During COVID Test!

Being the youngest kid in the house, I can tell you that the stereotype is true. The youngest kids are naughtier than the rest. I can’t emphasize enough how much I have made my parents worry about me while I was growing up. My mum still does and for the same reasons. As a kid, she would have to check on me every few minutes to see what I was doing. And if she was late even by a few minutes, she would either find me covered in black kajal smudge across my face and body or trying to eat a piece of a toy that I just broke. Other than a few faded old bruises and my notorious nature, there is not much that I’ve carried into my adulthood. But it is definitely not the same for others. Recently, a woman in New Zealand, Mary McCarthy, was living with pain on the right side of her nose. She is around 45 years old and did not know that for all these years that she had a piece from a tiddlywink game stuck in her nose!

She had regularly experienced pain and difficulty in breathing but never knew that it was the piece that was causing all the fuss. It was only when she got a nasal swab done for a Covid-19 test last year that things got worse. She started facing a severe sinus problem and her nose started leaking continuously.

After visiting several doctors who failed to get to the bottom of the problem, an ER doctor asked her if she had put something in her nose. In conversation with Stuff, she told, “Luckily the nurse and doctor believed it was more than sinus pain. They asked me if I had ever put anything up my nose and I told them about the tiddlywink, sort of laughing it off.” 

But the doctor didn’t take it lightly and decided on getting a CT scan done. The scan revealed the object and since it was too big to remove it while she was awake, McCarthy underwent a small operation. The doctor had pushed the tiddlywink piece from through her nose and extracted it from her mouth.

When asked how she had managed to inhale it, she remembered the times when she was playing tiddlywink, a game played with tiny button-like discs, with her brothers and came up with the idea of sticking one piece up each nostril. The idea was to see how far they could blow the pieces, but this one time, she ended up inhaling the piece instead of blowing it and that’s how it got stuck in there for almost 37 years!

Even when she was facing breathing issues, she never thought that it would be because of the little piece stuck up her nose. This reminds me of something my mum says, that no matter how careful parents are, kids find a way to cause trouble/mess. And while that is true in this case, it definitely doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t take the necessary precautions while raising their children. Having said that, even kids when they grow up and are facing any medical issues, should not ignore it.

Get yourself checked instead of ignoring a medical condition. Because what might seem unimportant or trivial right now could, later on, lead to a serious issue.