I Broke My Nose! (A Long Story)

Three weeks ago I was playing ultimate Frisbee with a bunch of my friends at the indoor gym at my school.  If you don’t understand ultimate Frisbee you are not alone.  It’s kind of like soccer in the way that it keeps changing directions and there is far too much running.  It is unlike soccer in the way that Frisbees move really fast and you sometimes have to jump and/or dive to grab the pesky little buggers.  Regardless, I still enjoy playing, it’s a nice pace of exercise and it’s one of the few co-ed sports I play that I don’t get picked last for.  In fact, I get picked right around the middle, which is before a handful of guy players get picked.  

Getting picked before a guy in sports makes me feel awesome.  It makes me feel like Rocky after he ran up all those stairs and was so excited about it for some reason he just started yelling.  As much as I enjoy yelling I don’t.  But I am that excited.

Anyway, after about an hour of playing, my team was in our end zone to score a point.  The space we play in isn’t incredibly large, and with my team trying to score points and the entire defensive team in the same place trying to block us from getting our point, it was rather crowded.

I don’t exactly remember what happened next, but I believe I bent down for some reason.  It’s possible I tripped, but I feel like there really wasn’t a reason at all.  My head now being down further than usual, and me being shorter than most everyone playing anyway, I was now at average elbow-level.  Some one’s elbow jabbed back, hitting me in the nose.  I went down pretty fast after that.  I wasn’t down long, not realizing the severity of my situation.  I figured it was just bruised and probably would have gone back to playing had my nose not started bleeding.  But it did start bleeding.  I still didn’t think anything was seriously wrong.  I have a weird pain tolerance.  I went into the bathroom to wait out the nosebleed. 

It was at this point that I started to freak out a little.  I looked in the grimy mirror above the sink and noticed my nose wasn’t aligned in the center of my face like it was supposed to be.  It was pushed slightly off to the right, and it was swollen.  I went back out with my tough face on and told everyone I thought it may be fractured.  My friend Luke said he would take me to the health service center to get it checked.  After this was a long list of things that delayed me getting my nose fixed.  This list starts with it being winter and me having to put on a large amount of protective clothing so as to not freeze.  It then goes to me and Luke going to get an ice pack from the workers at the Rec Center, and them making me fill out an accident report.  Then after walking to the student health center, we found it had closed an hour earlier.  We then walked to the emergency room, where we proceeded to wait and see an unnecessary amount of people.  All of them kept asking if I had passed out.  This led to me having to figure out whose insurance I was under and leaving numerous messages on my parents phones.   Both of them happened to be busy at this exact time. Luke, being the great friend he is, kept me entertained during most of this by making jokes about Scrubs.

Eventually they told me I would have to check back in to make an appointment to get it fixed.  Over the next couple days I kept trying to call in, but no one ever answered.  They finally called back as I was, literally, on my way to class. They told me I would have to come in that morning.  I had to miss class just so they could ask the same questions the emergency room had, something they defiantly could have done over the phone, earlier in the week.  I finally got my surgery scheduled, but had to find a legal adult who was will to pick up my sedated self from surgery and babysit me for the rest of the day.  I originally intended to have a friend pick me up, but my mom got wind of this and insisted she come up and watch me herself. 

On surgery day I went in at 7:40 in the morning, waited for 2 hours and was finally put under to get my nose pushed back into place.  The doctor had told me the surgery would take about 10 minutes, so I figured I’d be able to make my afternoon classes.  I woke up from surgery after three hours of sleeping at 1 in the afternoon.   The strange thing was that my nose never hurt after surgery.   I was expecting some massive pain because they gave me a bunch of Vicoden and put a cast on it.   I was actually a bit paranoid because my nose wasn’t in some sort of super-pain.

Nothing was wrong with my pain-free nose and I healed up pretty fast and my nose is back to the way it looked before this whole mess happened.

I’m playing Ultimate Frisbee again tomorrow.  I swear to God if I break something else I’m going to falcon punch through a wall…