Smelling Binge

Truck Driver Michael Sinai of West Mifflin was waiting for a mild day this week to load his wife and children into the family car and drive around the western Pennsylvania countryside. They were hoping to run across the smell of skunk. To Andrea Sinai, 8, this was very important. She has never smelled a skunk--in fact, until recently, she had never smelled anything. Andrea was a rare medical case, a baby born with a bony obstruction blocking both nostrils.

In 38 years of specializing in nose & throat troubles, Philadelphia's Dr. Matthew S. Ersner had seen only one previous case. If it had not been for an alert doctor who spotted the trouble when she was born, Andrea Sinai's chances of surviving would have been slim--she might have choked on her first bottle. As it was, she had to be fed with a medicine dropper. Often she choked and started to turn blue. Her mother hardly ever knew a good night's sleep; she kept waking to hear the reassurance of the child's raucous mouth breathing. Because her mouth was always dry, Andrea's food didn't taste good and she was underweight.

Three months ago, Dr. Ersner drilled through the bony obstructions and put a rubber tube through both nostrils so that scar tissue would not close them again. Even with this partial relief, her food tasted so much better that Andrea began to eat like a wolf and gained nine pounds. Last week Dr. Ersner took the tube out, and Andrea went on a smelling binge, running from food smells to her mother's perfume bottles.

To Dr. Ersner, the most interesting thing about Andrea's case was that her sinuses were fully developed. "All our lives," he said, "we've been teaching that sinuses need aeration to develop completely. Apparently we were wrong." Said Andrea as she left for home: "Doctor, I want to smell a skunk."

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