Kids do the weirdest things sometimes- like eating glue and sticking Cocoa Puffs up their noses. But, one object that’s not so easy to remove from a nostril are those little Tiddlywinks game pieces. Apparently a woman had one stuck in her nose for decades before a Covid-19 nasal swab jiggled the errant plastic disk.

tiddlywinks game pieces and pot
Via: Hannes Grobe/ Wiki Commons

The fuss all started when Mary McCarthy, a 45-year-old kitchen worker from Christchurch, New Zealand, had a Covid-19 nasal swab test back in October. Afterwards she had increasingly bad nasal pain and other sinus issues.

McCarthy had always had pain specifically in her right nostril, but it got a lot worse after the test.

Via: Mufid Majnun/Unsplash

She eventually ended up in the emergency room because of her symptoms, where the doctors and nurses asked her if she had ever pushed anything into her nose.

It all came flooding back as she remembered a game she and her siblings played where they would stick Tiddlywinks pieces up their nostrils and then exhale them out while holding the other nostril shut. Except there was this one time when she was 8 and she inhaled instead of exhaled.

She quickly forgot about the incident as a child, but apparently the swab test she had undergone in 2020 jiggled it loose. The piece then caused an infection which lingered for months until she went to the ER.

A CT scan revealed a blockage and she had to have surgery to remove the offending game piece. McCarthy said afterwards that, “There was calcification around it and that was probably why my nose had grown a bit crooked.”

The doctors noted that the game piece “hadn’t even lost its color” after all this time.

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