Reader, we don’t know if you are a parent or if you will be one someday. But if you happen to fall into either of those categories, rest assured, one day you will wind up in the emergency room with a child with a Lego up their nose. This incident is so commonplace that if you just point to your child and say “Lego in nose,” hospital staff will shrug and steer you toward a special room full of long, pointy tweezers designed to take Legos out of small noses. Please remember this prophetic warning when this happens to you. It is an inevitability.
Because if you don’t get that Lego extracted, your child may wind up like this New Zealand child we read about in The Guardian today. Special thanks to Jemaine “Nose For News” Clement for alerting us to this breaking story:
Two years ago, then-5-year-old Sameer Anwar of Dunedin complained to his parents that he couldn’t find a certain Lego piece. As Sameer had previously pushed an imitation pearl up his nostril, his concerned parents took their son to the doctor, who assured the parents that since the boy was not in distress. The Lego piece, if it was in fact inside the boy’s body, was bound to travel through his system on its own time. (Let us not forget the groundbreaking scientific study a few years ago when six people swallowed Lego mini-figure heads, deducing that that travel time was about two days. Science!)
Sameer’s Lego piece never surfaced though, until this week when a strong inhale of a plate of cupcakes apparently jarred the Lego piece loose. As The Guardian describes in poetic terms: “Immediately, his nose began to hurt. Thinking he’d sniffed up some cake crumbs, his mother helped him blow his nose, hoping to thoroughly clear his nostrils. But instead of pink cake crumbs, out dropped a tiny piece of black Lego, covered in fungus.” It appears to be the arm of a Lego mini-figure.
Well done, Sameer! Now that the boy is 7 years old, we assume that his days of shoving things in his nostrils are behind him. For the rest of you parents with small children… we’ll see you in the ER.
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I mean if you’re not gonna run a header image with Legos in a story about Legos, the least you could have done is use this image:
** Removed for reading comprehension issues
That’s not a Lego. It’s a pill inside a jar of jellybeans.
Always nice to get confirmation that I stopped watching this show at the right time.
You know, I sent an article to the AVClub the other day, featuring an in depth look at how the Alamo Drafthouse chain has still fostered an abusive culture of harassment toward female employees. Not only that, they have allowed unsafe working conditions for their employees, and used their “no talking” policy to target persons of color. But some stories just take priority, I guess.Here’s the other story, for those interested:
https://www.thepitchkc.com/drafthouse-abuse-kansas-city-mainstreet/
Jesus Christ. I just finished reading that piece and my two thoughts are: glad I never spent a dime there, and I hope the workers who got laid off while corporate collected PPP can get the support they need.
I was an ardent Alamo fan. At least once a month, but often more when they were doing series or special programs. I even held the premiere of my latest film at the Alamo. When I read this I felt sick, because I had been complicit, patronizing them, unaware their employees were being treated like shit. I used to work in a movie theater myself before i became a filmmaker. It wasn’t a great job by any means, but I didn’t experienced anything like these poor workers did. I felt betrayed by a brand to which I’d been loyal.It may not be worth much, but I wrote the theater, and told them I would not return until the management had been fired, and the chain had amply demonstrated they’d changed their culture.
That suuuuuuuuuuucks. The Alamo in Raleigh was my son’s first movie theater.
“Hmm, the Alamo Drafthouse story had important revelations on a timely issue, but the Lego-up-a-nose story had a Lego up a nose.”
Still better than stepping on one.
There is only one thing worse than standing on a piece of lego. As a matter of electrical safety, the UK 3-pin plug is a masterpiece of design and far superior to plugs in the US, Continental Europe and beyond. However its design does leave open the opportunity for the plug to be left lying on the floor with the pins pointed upwards…
How long till someone shows up with a red-pepper-flake on their butthole over the use of “Legos”?
Last month my awesome wife let me splurge on the UCS Lego Millennium Falcon for my son and I to build together. Out of 7,541 pieces, there was only one was couldn’t find. It’s a pretty common Lego piece, so we just swiped one off something else in the big pile in his room and moved on. After we were done, I found it where it had fallen under the leg of the table we were working at. I guess I have two points: LEGO’s quality control is spectacular, and also I’m glad I found the piece before I read this article.
To reduce the chances that you will misplace a piece, pour the parts into shallow containers. This will help keep them within your building area. Make sure you get everything out of the bag. A common mistake is to set aside a bag that still has parts in it.
You were gonna stick it up your nose, weren’t you?
Where else?
for my son and I You’re not fooling anybody.
Well…..Actually, the story is that he had been drooling over this thing for 3 years (I mean, I have too, but I never considered we’d actually get it) so about two years ago I made him a deal and told him if he’d save up half the money for it ($400!!) my parents and I would cover a quarter each. He agreed and then I figured it was the last I’d hear of it because he’s terrible at saving money for stuff he wants. Last month he came to me and said there was a rumor Lego was retiring the set in the fall, so I asked him how much he had and he said $325. I was floored. And I knew it would be heartbreaking for him to get that close and not be able to get it, so I called in my parents $200, and I covered what he was short. The greatest part is, he’s 14 and fully into the ‘dad isn’t cool and I want as little to do with him as possible’ phase, but this brought him out of his room and off of Fortnite, and we spent 7 fabulous days sitting side-by-side working on it together. Worth every last penny.
That’s genuinely heartwarming.
Meanwhile my partner bought a Megablocks or whatever Mewtwo one time and it took months of communicating with the company to finally get all the pieces they didn’t include in the box, and then the pieces they didn’t include in the pieces they sent us. There’s a good reason LEGO is more expensive.
Um how is there not more information from the article slash questions from the commentary about the fungus in his nose?
Two years lodged in a wet, damp, dark place. What would you expect?
More concern!
Eh, it was probably their second or third kid.
By that logic, you have fungus in your nose right now. And ears, and armpits, and other unmentionable places.I don’t buy it. No way that was stuck in a kid’s nose for 2-years.
We’ve collectively decided to just not think about it.
Most people have fungi living their noses, alongside bacteria (the populations keep each other in check). So the gunk on that Lego was probably part of the kid’s normal body flora. With that said, if that kid actually had a foreign body lodged in his nose for two full years, I hope someone took a nice thorough look up there. That could cause a nasty infection.
Scrolled for this – ‘covered in FUNGUS’? I hope that was supposed to say mucous.
You *really* do not want to know about the flora and fauna in your body. This planet is harsh enough without invasive microbial life colonizing our bodies.
This reminds me of the (Swiffer, I think) commercial where the woman says she never had a problem with dust until she learned what was in it and she names off things like dead skin (um, I hate to tell you this, but you have dead skin *on your body*) and dust mites (although I don’t think she uses that term. I just know it from selling Rainbow vacuum cleaners a long, long time ago. And they are also likely on your body.)
Great, now kids are going to be blowing their noses left and right trying to get free Legos.
The doctor seemed awful nonchalant about the LEGO making it all the way through the kid’s nasal passage with no issues. It could quite easily have suddenly popped into his throat and be choked on.
“Covered in Fungus” no.. lets not skip past that part. While not suprising that a dirty floor lego grew fungus in a moist place.. we needa get that boy to a hospital* before he grows a flower from his head and starts biting people.*by hospital I mean lab, we need a vaccine for whatever zombie fungus this is.
During the Blackhawks’ 2015 Stanley Cup Playoff run, I missed a game because I was at Lurie Children’s with my 3yo who stuck a sausage up his nose. They strapped him in to this backboard/straightjacket thingy to get it out, which was a little delicate since it could have broken up. He screamed so hard he gave himself hives and all I could do was laugh (obvs I knew he wasn’t really hurt) because he did it to myself. Still funny. Mother of the Year.
One of my earliest memories is sticking a piece of chicken up my nose, just to see if it would fit. My mom took me to the doctor, and they yanked it out with a curvy metal hook, which hurt a lot. I don’t remember being strapped down – I think my mom just used a heavy dose of Catholic guilt to restrain me.The newer strategy for getting something out of a nose is to plug the unaffected nostril and blow into the kid’s mouth, with the idea that the pressure in the mouth/throat will push the object out of the affected nostril. I had a coworker attempt that one time, and the kid vomited right in his face. Anyway, this is all a reminder that I need to invest in a pair of bayonet forceps and a nasal speculum – the set costs about $40 on Amazon and is a self-explanatory way to extract just about anything from a child’s nose.
We tried the nose blow thing; learned it from his preschool when he shoved a bead up there. I def think the backboard scared him straight because he didn’t do it again.
I have this really cute picture of him post-extraction, half still crying, half smiling, covered in hives, with a popsicle.
Last month, I eating lunch, blew my nose, and snot out a tiny ball of wilted spinach. The month before THAT, I was eating a Hot Pocket and sneezed, and out came a spray low-fat cheese sauce.Post-nasal drip is a bitch, is what I’m trying to say. And sinuses are a wonderland.
No one?No one here is going to state the most insidious scourge of the Lego-enthusiast’s household?CATS.We have cats. We have …. many, many, many cats. For purposes of clarity, after 25 years of having cats in my house…. the only correct number of cats in your house is ZERO. (Our current number BTW, including newborn kittens, is 13.)We also have a 14-year-old son who has been groomed by his older cousin and his grandma to be a Lego prodigy. Kid built the roller coaster in 2 afternoons. Not 2 days… 2 afternoons.And somehow, every single week for the last 3 years straight, when I pull the couch from one section of our lino-floored family room to another, there is ALWAYS the same detritus:A disgusting, swirling ball of cat hair;3 or 4 ball-point pens;one (usually exactly one) stylus from some device or other; and 30 to 40 Lego pieces. I don’t know where the cats are getting them. I don’t know if they’ve stolen one of the 50 storage containers in my son’s room and are secretly moving the couch to sprinkle a few paw-fuls, Shoemaker and the Elves-style, under the couch on Friday before we sweep on Saturday. But no story about Legos that appears in my personal universe can exist without a fever-dream image of an undulating mass of cat hair and Legos.I’m OK though. As long as the prescription holds out.
The picture at the top is clearly duplo not lego. If a kid had had a piece of duplo stuck up his nose for two years and then suddenly blew it out, he’d have his own exhibition in Ripley’s by Christmas.
That’s not Duplo. That’s the hand of a standard Lego minifigure, which can pop out with very little effort. I estimate there are about 43,000 of them in our vacuum cleaner bag.
“at the top”
My mistake. Thought you meant the pic of the actual nasal explorer. Lego Nasal Explorer would make a great set, by the way.
Nice try, kid. The Simpsons already did it:
Kids do dumb things all the time. My sister stuck her finger into the center hole of a table at Subway when she was 6 or 7. We tried to loosen it with butter and oil from the restaurant, but it didn’t work. Eventually. The fire department came and used the jaws of life to cut the metal table into smaller and smaller pieces around her finger. Right before they planned to take her to the hospital to remove the final piece, the table slid off.