When Arizona man Andi Norton blew his nose in the shower recently, a small piece of plastic flew out and a long-forgotten memory resurfaced. In an Instagram post, the 32-year-old said that when he was around six years old, he put "one of those tiny dot Legos" up his nose—and when he was unable to retrieve it, he had the "brilliant idea" to send a Lego man up there on a "rescue mission." He planned to connect the top of the head to the dot, but the Lego man's head came off and also became lodged in his nostril. Norton says after he "loudly panicked," his mom removed the head with tweezers. But the dot, possibly forgotten in the commotion, remained up his nose for 26 years until it came out in the shower.
"After cleaning it off, the way the Lego memory came rushing back to me was kind of like the movie Ratatouille when the food critic gets transported in his mind to his childhood," Norton tells People. Norton says he has long suffered from sinus issues and his doctor advised him to blow his nose in the shower during dry, hot weather "because the humidity of the steam and everything." "My whole life I've had sinus sensitivity, allergies, and issues with congestion," he tells Newsweek. "Since I am allergic to cats, dogs, grass, many of the native trees, and dust, and I've always been exposed to one or more of these things, I lived my life assuming any congestion issues were just simply caused by the allergies."
On Instagram, he said he believes the Lego piece has been "the culprit" behind breathing problems including sleep apnea over the last 26 years. "I can breathe out of this side of my nose now, and it's fantastic," he said. "I haven't been able to do that since I was a child." He said he tagged Lego in the post "because I feel like I've broken some kind of record for 'longest time with lego stuck in sinus.'" (More Lego stories.)
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