It lived rent-free in her head for 20 years.
A Georgia woman was shocked that a huge “booger” in her nose was actually a bead that had been lodged there for two decades. A TikTok video documenting the disgusting discovery has racked up over 7.6 million views.
“I stared at it in amazement because it was huge and was inside me for 20 years,” Hannah Hamilton, 23, told Caters News of the olfactory interloper.
The revolting phenomenon first came to light after the Smyrna resident suffered a sinus infection earlier this year that left her nose completely congested. Hoping to get to the root of the problem, she examined her nostrils with an ear wax camera and discovered a blue object lodged in her nasal passage.
Fortunately, Hamilton managed to extract the sapphire sinus squatter and, after examining the object, “the memory of the bead flooded back to me,” she said.
“I don’t remember much about that time but my mom was very into arts and crafts, so we always had beads, glitter, etc., around the house,” the aghast gal recalled of the incident, which occurred when she was only 3 years old. “The memory I had is of me standing in front of the linen closet in the kid’s bathroom and pulling the bead out of a basket in the closet.”
She then popped the bauble into her nose to see if it would fit — but couldn’t get it back out again. Hamilton reportedly didn’t even think to tell her mother, who was a nurse for 10 years.
As the years went on, the blocked-up woman gradually forgot about the incident, until about a year ago, when Hamilton recounted the childhood story to her fiancé.
“I was telling my fiancé Zack that I remembered sticking a bead in my nose as a little kid, but I didn’t remember it ever coming out,” Hamilton told her 36,100 TikTok followers.
However, at the time, she “assumed it not a real memory, maybe something that I had seen or heard from a show or book.”
It was only when Hamilton spotted the bead that she realized that it wasn’t just in her head, so to speak.
Thankfully, removing her inadvertent heirloom went off without a hitch.
“Prying it out definitely hurt but not as much as you’d think, and it was only for a few seconds,” described the grateful gal. “Once it was out of that between section, I blew as hard as I could.”
She added: “As soon as I got it out I called my fiancé, who was just as shocked, amazed and disgusted as I was.”
Hamilton is using her experience as a cautionary tale.
“My advice to anyone else who suspects they could still have something up their noses from childhood is that 99% of the time your parents will catch it before you have an issue,” she said. “Better safe than sorry! If you think there’s a chance you should get it checked out, I wish I had checked when I remembered the memory so many years ago.”
Hamilton’s not the first person to forget something up their nose. In 2019, an Australian man stunned doctors after it was revealed that his persistent sinus infections were the result of marijuana he smuggled in his nostril nearly two decades earlier.
