Embarrassing injuries volume 1
My nose and I will go first
BIG news around here has me drafting letters to the FDA and OSHA and any other gov’ment agency responsible for keeping us safe. While washing my face a few weeks ago, I jammed a finger up my nose. Obviously accidental, this was done hard enough for a fingernail of very average length to make a small cut in the edge of my nostril or, to be precise, my alar rim. Talk about feeling totally inept at one of the most basic hygiene things homo sapiens have done since leaving the cave.
I am unable to explain how this occurred other than I must’ve gotten overzealous about my facial cleansing and lost control of a finger. The label of my 1990s-branded facial cleanser provided NO WARNING about this potential hazard, hence my campaign of letters to get warnings added to all facial cleanser bottles.
Until then, we’ll have to lean on education provided by AI overviews on Google to keep us safe. Their instructions for the most ordinary of human endeavors are not as insultingly obvious as I once thought. The error of my ways is now revealed to me and going forward, I will remember: “gentle” and “circular.”
Whether or not their injuries were self-inflicted and in such a halfwitted way, I’m relieved to know others have also experienced trauma to their alar rims. (ICD-10 code of S01.21XA: “Laceration without foreign body of nose, initial encounter.”) And now I’m wondering how else others have injured theirs.
This pathetic injury of mine got me thinking about the injuries we all incur. We usually don’t know exactly how they came about, can’t anticipate them, and they often happen while doing the most ordinary of things. A few examples I’m familiar with follow for your reading pleasure.
A woman I met at a local place had both arms in slings. Her husband was getting a real kick out of telling people he’d put her in a straight-jacket, before telling the real story: she had tripped on a curb and broke BOTH elbows.
My friend’s friend is no longer able to drive carpool because her foot fell asleep while laying down with one of her kids at night and when she walked on it, she broke it.
My brother was carrying his writhing son down the stairs to put him in time-out. Leo’s offense was refusing to pick up the flashcards he had scattered on the stairs. Abe slipped on one of the offending flash cards and breaking his ankle in pretty awful ways. Leo was fine. This is what we call adding injury to insult.
The time has come to admit that my face washing injury was not actually my first nostril injury. My prior one was even more ignominious.
Downhill skiing at Bridger Bowl was a Christmas Break tradition our family looked forward to each year during our teen and college years. Since our skiing was confined to a single day each year and money was nearly always tight, we were not well-outfitted. For much of my childhood, we skied in jeans. Why, I am unable to tell you. What I can tell you is that, once experienced, a person is unable to forget the feel of pegged jeans digging into your ankles inside ski boots.
Since we never owned gear, we rented. Most years, we stopped at Panda Rentals. Dad’s friend Bill owned this ski rental shop/gas station combination, well-positioned on the north side of town and on the way to Bridger Bowl.
On this fateful day, we’d purchased our lift tickets for a now-astonishing $55 or something. This makes me all the more appalled that lift tickets at one Utah resort have gone up to an indecent $330 for ONE DAY. You could buy very many tacos for that amount of money.
Collecting our rented skis from the ski rack, we trudged toward the locker room, me carrying my skis more awkwardly than usual over my shoulder. Halfway there, my mittened grip on the skis began to fail. One or both skis started sliding apart and backward over my shoulder. A single extremity was available to try and stop their fall: my chin.
I would not recommend this. In my attempt to pinch the escaping skis between chin and shoulder, one of the brake arms—the prongs on the bottom of skis—somehow ended up jamming up one nostril and jerking my head backward with the full force of the falling ski.1
My craniofacial vanity flashed before my watering eyes as I imagined the embarrassment of having my nostril torn by a falling ski. It’s impossible to know how a brake arm ended up my nose, and similarly hard to know how things resolved. Thankfully, it did, leaving my nostril (and pride) only slightly bloodied and bruised, not ripped. Had the ski and brake arm been moving any faster, I likely would’ve been eligible for another ICD-10 code, J34.8211: “External nasal valve collapse, static (if the cut caused structural, functional collapse of the alar rim).” Good thing my alar rim2 didn’t collapse.
It would appear from even just my nasal injuries that this living business is not for the faint of heart. There are hazards in absolutely everything, including things as innocuous as washing your face, carrying skis, or baking at home. On that last note, this entire piece was typed with a thumb—my right one, if you care to know—sporting an 8mm wide and layers deep wound acquired last Saturday. I was listening to Dateline and zesting an orange for the British scones I planned to take to a neighbor, when my thumb slipped and…I will not get describe what I’m sure you can imagine.
Out of consideration, and even though I was fairly sure no skin had made it into the batter, I opted not to share this batch.
What’s one of your best embarrassing injuries or near injuries?
Isn’t life cool and aren’t people interesting? See you in the next one…
Maybe someone out there is writing their own Substack article about the time they saw a girl get a ski up her nose…
I promise this is not an attempt to achieve search ranking for the phrase “alar rim.” I just can’t help proudly using my newfound medical terminology.