I’ve always had sinus problems, so I went to my doctor to see what they could do for me. They prescribed me this nasal spray that was meant to clear things right up.
But I try spraying it in my nose and I can’t feel anything. I try each nostril a couple of times and nothing’s coming out.
Next morning I wake up and I had this tingling sensation across the bridge of my nose.
I ring up the doctor, and I’m like, ‘doc, what’s the deal with this nasal spray?’
The doctor tells me that nasal spray comes out in small doses because it’s a steroid that’s meant to encourage development of my sinus muscles.
I hear this, and I’m thinking, ‘Really? So if I keep at this spray and do some exercises I could have some totally jacked nostrils?’
The doctor said that would be theoretically true. So from then on I’m double dosing on the nasal spray, flaring my nostrils on the train to work and doing all these other nose exercises.
I could feel the progress, there was this band of muscle across the bridge of my nose, touching it was like touching abs, but on my face.
I could tell I achieved my goal of totally jacked nostrils when I stuck my finger up my nose one time and almost broke the damn thing.
I was telling my friends how I had totally jacked nostrils, and none of them believed me. So I figured I had to put on a show, a grand display, to prove to them just how jacked my nostrils were.
I invited all my friends over, and when I had their attention I shoved a pencil up my nose, as far as it could go. Then I gave my nose a bit of a bewitched wiggle, and I broke that pencil clean in half.
My friends were blown away. I had just snapped a pencil hands free and proved I have totally jacked nostrils.
But this presented a new problem: I now had half a pencil jammed up my nose, and nothing to hold onto to try pull it out.
There was this bulge in my nostril that went up to my eye, then just disappeared, so I had no idea how far it went in.
My friends got me some tweezers from the bathroom and get me my tweezers and I try pull the pencil out.
This is where I had another problem. The pencil stuck out more than I thought, and first time I stuck the tweezers in I hit the pencil sooner than I expected and just shunted the thing further up my nose.
I could now feel something pressing up against my eye, which was now starting to water.
I finally managed to get a good hold on the pencil with the tweezers, and this presented another problem:
You ever broken a pencil before? They never break clean. They’re always covered in jagged edges. As I pulled the pencil out all the jagged edges caught on the inside of my nostrils and dug in.
So now the pencil couldn’t go any further in, and it didn’t feel like it could come any further out either.
But what other option did I have? I kept at it, ignoring how the splinters were catching and burrowing these furrows into my nostril.
Eventually something gave and I yanked the tweezers out of my nose. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the whole pencil, just the chunk of wood I was able to get a hold on.
I couldn’t get good purchase on any part of the pencil after that. I was just pulling chaff and wood fibres out of my nose. I decide if I have to scrape this entire pencil out of my nose, that’s just what I’ll do.
This presented a new problem. There’s all this chaff and wood dust in the air, and my other nostril works fine. Eventually I start feeling the chaff irritating my other nostril.
And I think, ‘Oh no. I have a pencil shoved up my totally jacked nostril, and I have to sneeze. I don’t know what’s going to happen’. I try to resist, but my resolve doesn’t hold.
My totally jacked nostril clamps down on the pencil, splintering it into the tiniest wood fragments a pencil could ever be.
I block my other nostril and blow chunks of crushed graphite and wood dust out of my nose. It helps a lot, but if I breath through my nose at this point, I’m just inhaling splinters.
I can scrape out bits of wood with the tweezers now, but I can’t get up far enough to get it all.
And that’s the point where we all decide it’s time to take me to the hospital.
I know the ending to this story is a bit of a dud, but what’s the moral here? Don’t stick a pencil up your nose, no matter how totally jacked your nostrils are?