A grain that gave us a fright

RS Dalal

I recently received an invite to a book launch. The author was a young, brilliant paediatrician whom we had befriended a few years ago when our grandchildren were born. ‘How could a doctor so busy find time to co-author a book on the challenges of parenting?’ I wondered aloud.
While listening to him and the suave anchor talk about the book, a nightmarish incident involving our younger daughter flashed through my mind. How she had kept us on tenterhooks for 40 fateful minutes!
In 1986, I was a Deputy Director at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in Mussoorie. Our elder daughter was five years old; the younger was just over three.
It was a Saturday afternoon. Our kids were busy playing games with their toys in the courtyard and had roasted grams (a popular healthy snack among vegetarians) in two small steel bowls. My wife and I were inside the house, leisurely lounging.
Suddenly, the elder one came shouting that her sibling had put a grain of roasted gram inside her nose. I jumped out of the quilt and rushed outside to check. To my shock, I spotted the grain stuck deep in her nostril.
I quickly rang up the academy doctor and explained the tricky situation to him. ‘The dispensary opens at 3 pm. I can’t do anything before that,’ he tersely told me. I looked at my watch. It was only 2.20 pm. ‘Ensure that she doesn’t push it up further; try to distract her mind; it could be fatal if it travels to her windpipe,’ he warned. I was at my wits’ end for a while. Both my wife and I acted like clowns in a circus to entertain the child and keep her mind off the grain stuck in her nose. Those moments hung heavily over us.
The middle-aged burly doctor at the dispensary was supported by a skeletal staff comprising a nurse and two paramedics. The nurse, Daisy, was energetic and efficient and that made her popular. We reached the dispensary even before it opened. The doctor examined my daughter while Daisy promptly proceeded to place a tray of sterilised surgical instruments before him. The doctor was reluctant to take a chance for fear of further pushing the stuck grain up and advised us to take her to Dehradun, which had better medical facilities. Simultaneously, he started filling a form for requisitioning an academy vehicle for the purpose.
We stood completely shaken and flabbergasted. Daisy picked up a pair of tweezers from the tray and asked us if she could intervene. We trusted her.
‘Please do,’ we nodded our heads even before the doctor could react. With a paramedic flashing a torch, Daisy pulled out the grain, which had become soft due to nasal moisture, using the tweezers softly yet surely. What a relief it was when the ordeal ended!