Thanks to a COVID test, an NZ woman discovered a 37-year-old toy stuck up her nose, so there you have it the one and only upside to the pandemic.
Mary McCarthy said she always has an annoying pain the right side of her nose, but learned to live with it. When she went for a COVID test last year, her nose pain seemed to get increasingly worse – so she went to Christchurch Hospital’s emergency department.
“I always had difficulties breathing through my nose over the years but never gave it much thought,” she told Stuff.
Turns out she had a yellow Tiddlywink stuck up her nose for nearly four decades, after sticking it there as a kid.
If you don’t know what a Tiddlywink is, that’s completely fair. I also had to look it up, but was a little shocked by the Urban Dictionary definition.
“Tiddlywinks is an indoor game played by men played on the floor or a bed. Players stroke their shafts until climax, thereby propelling semen, called ‘winks’, into the air.”
However, I quickly realised that the game is not played with semen, but instead colourful circles that are shot into a little pot.
McMarthy was playing the age-appropriate version and put one up each nostril and “blowing them out to see how they would go.”
“One time I accidentally inhaled one instead of blowing it out, and I was a bit too scared to tell my mother, so I didn’t,” she said.
“I remember being terrified at the time, thinking ‘where has it gone.’”
A CT scan revealed that she had the Tiddlywink stuck up her nose, and she had to undergo an operation. Basically, the COVID test had dislodged the disc and caused an infection.
I wonder if taking the Tiddlywink out of McCarthy’s nose gave her super intelligence, like it did to Homer on The Simpsons?
D’oh!
