Twenty years after the woman stuck the piece in her nostril in a ‘bead pie’, it now sports a sharp stammer – can you guess how?
Woman pulls bead from her nose 20 years after she stuck it there as a toddler
A 30-year-old woman has had a remarkable recovery after a piece of bead stuck in her nose two decades ago.
Beads used in the children’s sport called “bead pie” were blamed for the woman’s severe chronic asthma, and so she kept a video of the way she removed a bead to practise the manoeuvre to stop herself blowing out her airways.
Doctors at the hospital in Melkyung, north-eastern South Korea, found the bead during an emergency surgery after the woman complained of severe chronic wheezing at the end of a 34-hour patient visit, reports Korea Herald.
They found the bead was about 0.15mm long, and another 0.03mm high. The practice of using beads in bead pie, a children’s game that starts with a sponge in the centre of a plate, is illegal in the South Korean.
Dr Kim Kwang-soo, a department of otolaryngology leader at Sanhwo Hospital, in Daegu, told the Korea Herald: “I have not found a case of infection caused by a piece of bead stuck in the nose.”
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He added: “While we do not know how this beads happened, the patient heard about the practice of using resin beads in the ear and then stuck them to her nose to avoid it blowing out her ears. It’s a commendable innovation.”
The woman, who was not named, got the bead from her mums in 1993, and kept the remainder in a jar.
It was just a matter of time before she began blowing out her ears, but she never realised she was poisoning herself.
She could have died as her choking would have forced the beads out her nose and into her lungs, Dr Kim said.
But she appeared to have recovered sufficiently to go home and “it’s now so tiny that she can’t even tell”.