Mary McCarthy of New Zealand suffered a lifetime of pain and breathing problems. But after a nasal swab for COVID-19, her nostril hurt so much that she went to a doctor, who asked her if she'd ever gotten anything stuck in her nostril. McCarthy suddenly recalled playing with tiddlywinks as an 8-year-old. She and her siblings liked to stick the small plastic discs in their nostrils and see how far they could shoot them by exhaling sharply. McCarthy says she remembered putting a disc in her nostril and not being able to blow it out. She was too scared to tell her mother and so she put the incident out of her mind.
The doctor ordered a CT scan which revealed a mysterious object in her right nostril.
From Oddity Central:
A CT scan revealed that there was indeed something stuck in her right nostril, but it didn't look like a tiddlywinks piece. The doctor tried removing it while she was awake, but it proved too painful so she had to undergo an operation that involved pushing the mysterious object through her nose and extracting it through her mouth. It turned out that the object was indeed a small plastic wink, only with years of calcification built up all around it. The doctor told Mary that the Covid-19 swab test had dislodged it after nearly four decades and caused an infection that amplified the pain she had put up with all this time.
