A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose

About a year ago, a 36-year-old woman entered London’s North Middlesex University Hospital experiencing all of the telltale signs of a fist-fight. She was bleeding from the nose, complaining of vision loss and experiencing swelling and extreme pain on the left side of her face, according to a recent case report published in The BMJ. Her symptoms all pointed to an eye socket fracture—what’s called an orbital blowout fracture, an injury typically sustained from punches or other facial trauma. But all this woman had done was blow her nose. “It’s very bizarre. We see eye socket fractures from people in trauma, people getting punched, people in a fight,” says Dr. Sam Myers, an upper gastrointestinal tract doctor who treated the woman, and co-author of the BMJ paper. “I’ve never, ever heard of it ever happening from someone blowing their nose. Everyone blows their nose. They don’t think they can blow out their eye.” It’s fairly easy to fracture some small facial bones, but it’s “very rare” such a thing would happen from blowing your nose, says Myers. It’s not entirely clear why the woman got so unlucky—she told doctors she hadn’t blown her nose exceptionally hard, and she was otherwise healthy—but Myers speculates that she “must have had a predisposition or a weakening in the skeletal area around the eye” that simply gave way. The woman also smoked about 20 ciga...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime medicine onetime Source Type: news