It was a lazy Sunday morning. I was reading my Bible in the hammock, waiting for worship to start at 7. Usually we have team worship at 6:30 am, but we were all tired that day from our church conference in Tasba Pain the day before.
I was just feeling relaxed and happy when Rachel called my name around the corner. ¨Some kid is here with something wrong with his nose. Do you want to come?¨ I went to the steps and saw a young mother with a 1-year-old boy in he arms. The rest of the medical team was already there, and Jenny was trying to discover what the problem was. ¨I think she´s saying he´s got something stuck in his nose,¨ Jenny told us, ¨but she doesn´t speak Spanish very well, so I´m not sure.¨
We looked up the kid´s nose, and saw . . . something. We weren´t sure exactly what. It was dark brown and shiny, and defintely blocking his whole nose. ¨Is it a bean?¨ The mom couldn´t tell us.
So the next big question, ¨What are we supposed to do about it?¨ None of us have ever taken college classes that even mentioned how to get beans out of one-year-old noses. We found some small forceps and started telling each other, ¨Do you think these will work? Will we just push it farther back? Do you wanna do it? I don´t wanna do it.¨
Jenny and Mindy bravely decided to try. The kid immeditaely started screaming and struggling, of course, and the forceps kept slipping off the bean (or whatever it was). We were clearly making no progress.
I suggested using a syringe to try to suck it out, so we went to the clinic to try. That method was even less effective then the forceps.
We were in over our heads. Jenny and Mindy went to get Janet, the MINSA nurse. I sat in our clinic watching the kid glare at my mistrustfully from his mom´s lap.
Janet told us she had alreayd tried getting the bean out the night before, and couldn´t, which is why the mom took him to us. (Great). She knew another method to move it, though - stick cotton in the kid´s ears, hold the open nostril shut, and blow hard into his mouth. With no other exit, the air would have to go through the blocked nostril and push the bean out. So which of us wanted to blow in his mouth?
Silence.
¨OK, I´ll do it,¨ I said. (¨What am I thinking?¨ I said in my mind). So we held the kid´s ears shut, put a finger on his other nostril, and held down his legs to keep him from kicking me in the stomach. I leaned over him, took a deep breath, and dove.
There´s nothing quite like sealing your mouth around the snotty, screaming mouth of a one-year-old baby and blowing from you diaphragm. Classical singer´s training is good for something, I suppose. But it didn´t work. The stupid bean wouldn´t move. We tried for two hours, alternating me blowing and Janet trying to pull the bean out. Finally Janet said we would try later that afternoon. The kid´s nose was pretty swollen, so we gave him ibuprofen and hoped it would go down.
We went to Janet´s house that afternoon and found her smiling. She had already got the bean out two hours before. ¨How did you do it?¨ we asked in wonder. ¨With this!¨ she said, and pulled a bobby pin out of her hair. She said it was huge - not a normal bean at all - and the kid´s nose was small. We had good reason to have trouble getting it out. It took the bobby pin to get behind it and scoop it out.
You get everything around here, I suppose. Still, that was pretty weird. I´m now the official mouth-to-mouth bean-getter-outer at the clinic, and we know to keep bobby pins on hand.
