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.”
Myers emphasizes that the average nose-blower is likely not at risk of an orbital blowout, and says there are few preventive measures that people can or should take, aside from avoiding “excessive” or aggressive nose-blowing.
Still, “I’ve blown my nose a bit less since then,” Myers says.