A British woman blew her nose so hard that she fractured her eye socket. The strange story was detailed in a recent issue of the medical journal BMJ Case Reports. The unidentified woman was at work when she grabbed a tissue to blow her nose. After forcefully blowing her nose, she lost vision in both of her eyes.
Her vision returned, but a few hours later, her nose started to bleed and her left eye started to swell, according to LiveScience. The woman called an ambulance and was taken to the hospital where a CT scan revealed that "she had a break in the lamina papyracea, one of the bones surrounding the eye."
In the report, Dr. Sam Myers speculated as to how she managed to break the bones by simply blowing her nose. He explained that she had a cold and had been blowing her nose more than usual and the way in which she blew her nose could have caused the issue.
The woman tended to close off one nostril and then blow forcefully, which almost doubles the pressure in the sinuses as it forces all of the pressure out through the remaining open nostril, instead of both nostrils, he said.
He also suggested that the fact the woman smoked a pack of cigarettes every day could have played a role in creating enough pressure in her sinuses to cause the eye socket to break.
Smoking changes the pressures in a person's sinuses, which are located next to the eye sockets, and this may have made her more prone to fracture, he said.
Dr. Meyers said the woman did not require surgery and was released after spending a night in the hospital. He said that she did not suffer permanent damage to her vision, but that she still experiences pain on the side of her face.
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