I hate hospitals. I am not sure I have ever run into someone who actually enjoys them, but the smell, the starkness and the fear underneath it all is more than I can handle.

And appropriately and unsurprisingly, my children are not huge fans of them either, especially emergency rooms.

In the last two weeks, I have heard from a couple of other mothers about recent trips with their children to the ER, both to sew up wounds from falling down stairs and smashing heads on coffee tables. As they described in painful detail their waiting time in the holding room, then the waiting time in the patient room and then the absolutely painful bill from the hospital, I was reminded of the most successful trip to the hospital I have ever had (aside from the birth of my children).

Last fall, my husband and I went away for a weekend, leaving our children with my sister-in-law. She has three older children of her own, so I felt I was leaving them in completely capable hands. Turns out I was, but my kids are completely incapable of being normal.

My daughter, in some freak jewelry-making accident, managed to stick a blue bead, the size of a sweet pea, up her nose. Rather than calling me straight away, my sister-in-law chose to let nature take its course and she waited to see if it would come out on its own or if ridiculous amounts of nose blowing might release it.

We came home the next day to the bead still jammed up Elliot's nose. I could even see it from the outside, a tiny little lump on the outside of the bridge of her nose.  I have always prided myself on remaining calm in these sorts of situations, but there might have been some panic when I scooped her up, shouted over my shoulder, "We are going to the emergency room," and headed out the door, mere moments after just arriving home from the airport.

We arrived at the emergency room and immediately I felt my little girl's heart begin to race. To her credit, she might have been responding to the sheer terror I was feeling as I imagined instruments of torture being used to extract the bead from her delicate little nose.

My husband checked in at the desk and we stood idly in the corner waiting for our name to be called, my daughter growing increasingly more anxious as the minutes passed. Miraculously, we were called quickly and stepped behind the desk soElliot could be checked in, have her vitals taken and have a nurse officially assess the situation.

By this point, Elliot had lost it. I had always considered her brave and resilient to new and surprising things, but she could not take it. She was shrieking, screaming, kicking, crying, clawing and causing some serious cramping in my right side from me holding her down in my lap.

I told the staff what happened and the nurse peered at us without surprise. Clearly she had seen this before, and she started to put together Elliot's chart. Then a nurse poked her head around the corner from the backroom.

"Have you tried blowing it out?" the nurse asked.

I laughed. Duh, I had tried to get Elliot to blow her nose multiple times, but all it had resulted in was her bursting into tears because it was becoming more and more uncomfortable to have that foreign object in her nose.

"No, I mean, really blow it out, " the nurse said.

She then proceeded to tell me that I needed to try because it was something that could not be tried once she was officially checked in as a patient. This is what she meant:

Plug the side of the nose that does not house the bead. Then blow into her mouth like I am administering CPR. The force of the air shooting into her nasal cavity should dislodge the bead.

I will be honest, I stared at the nurse like she was crazy and then wondered where she had gone to school. But she returned my stare earnestly and told me it would work.

So blow I did. The first attempt dislodged only nasal fluids. It was just gross. I wiped my mouth and eye and cheek and told my daughter, "This is love."

The second attempt sent the small blue bead flying into my lap.

It worked.

I jumped up, restrained myself from bear hugging the nurse, thanked the staff a million times and we left, all while my husband muttered to himself, "Thank God. That saved us a lot of money."

There are some home remedies and old wives tales that may or may not solve health problems or issues with small objects, like lima beans and beads. But with the "blow it out" solution in my arsenal, I have felt better prepared for any further incidents with teeny tiny things that my children can't help but shove up their noses.

Why they do this to begin with is a whole other issue...