The Nosebleed

In case you don’t know, I regularly avoid posting about things as they happen unless they’re time sensitive. This story happened eight years ago, in the end-days of my time in university. It was a decently interesting thing and well worth writing about, but at the time I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my parents. However, I’ve decided it’s finally time that I broke my peace in the service of your mild entertainment.

I went to hospital twice for a single nosebleed.

If you tell people you went to the ER for a nosebleed, you get judgmental looks, so I’ve kept it to myself. Also, it gets kinda gross. You’ve been warned.

The nosebleed started suddenly at exactly midnight, pouring harder than I knew nosebleeds could pour, out of both nostrils. I don’t remember how it started exactly, but I think I sneezed? Or I tried to blow my nose? Something absurdly normal like that.

There was so much blood that even though I was leaning forward and pinching the bridge of my nose instead of nostrils so that the blood was flowing out, I could still feel it drizzling down my throat. I panicked and called 111, which is the non-emergency health line in the UK. I explained what was happening to the nurse and she advised me to go to the nearest ER, which kind of surprised me. I expected some advice about how to pinch my nose or whether to ice it or something like that.

So I walked to the ER with a box of tissues (I was going through them disturbingly fast) and waited for my turn. I remember being kind of worried that the nosebleed would stop before I was seen and I’d be labelled an exaggerating attention-seeker. When I was finally seen, a couple of junior doctors tried and failed to stop the bleeding in a bunch of different ways resulting in their increasing panic as their supervising doctor watched on calmly. Finally, they had me stay in the ER waiting room and just keep doing what I was doing so they could keep an eye on me, and eventually the bleeding slowed down to the manageable pace of a very runny nose, so they sent me home around four in the morning and told me to come back if it got bad again.

Back in my dorm room, I tried to get some shut-eye before my 8am class, but couldn’t really sleep because my nose was still bleeding. I went to class exhausted with a roll of toilet paper for my nose (I had run out of tissues at this point). After an hour or two of sniffles and lots of nose wiping, I made the mistake of bending over to get a pen from my bag. Immediately, the extreme bleeding started again, even worse than before. I didn’t even say anything to my teacher, I just grabbed my bag and toilet paper and went straight back to the ER. (Conveniently, my dorm, university, and hospital were all within a block of each other.)

For my second time in the ER, they gave me tissues and a cardboard container meant for vomit for me to throw used tissues in because I was going through them so fast. Seriously, it took maybe thirty seconds for a tissue to be completely soaked through. I was sleep-deprived, covered in blood, my nose was raw from the tissues and pinching, and every so often, I coughed out globs of blood. But still—it was just a freaking nosebleed! I figured they had more important things to deal with and expected to wait at least an hour, like the first time. Then I started puking blood and got rushed right in.

Life hack: Don’t wanna wait hours in the ER? Puking blood works like a charm.

The same junior doctors were there again with the same supervising doctor, who was a little more hands-on this time. They still couldn’t figure out where I was bleeding from and nothing they did could stop it, so they suggested cauterizing the entire inside of my nose in both nostrils. I readily agreed—anything to end it. I just wanted to be able to sleep without worrying about drowning in my own blood. Any other day of my life, I’d have thought twice about agreeing to have someone burn the entire inside of my nose without any kind of painkillers or anaesthesia, but I was at the end of my rope. It had been over ten hours of a nosebleed, and I’d been awake for nearly thirty hours at that point. I just wanted it to be over.

We had to wait for it to slow enough for the doctor—another doctor now—to get a visual. While I was lying on the table, he also used a tool to pull out foot-long clumpy strings of bloody globs out of my throat, formed from hours of blood coming down my throat combined with breathing through my mouth. It was disgusting, and a miracle I didn’t vomit because I’m not great with disgusting things. Maybe I was vomited-out by then. The nurse made a joke, and I couldn’t even laugh because I was too miserable and grossed out.

Finally, the doctor stuck a thin rod—I think it was wood?-—deep into my nose and rubbed the burning end of it all around the inside. Imagine the worst nose-based covid test but with fire on the end of it. And then the doctor was done and said he hoped he never saw me again, in the nicest way.

As I walked through the halls filled with patients much worse off than I was, all eyes turned to me. I felt like I’d been punched in the face. At one point I ducked into a bathroom for more toilet paper and was shocked at what I saw in the mirror. I looked like I’d been punched in the face. I was covered in twelve hours’ worth of errant blood, my hair was stuck together with it, and there was dried blood on my cracked lips and around my mouth from puking. My nose was rubbed raw and ran with watery, blood-streaked mucus from the cauterization irritation. My eyes were red and puffy from exhaustion and involuntary tears of pain streaked my blood-stained cheeks. It was probably the worst I’ve ever looked. Despite all that, I was mainly feeling relieved that the outrageous bleeding had stopped.

I’d been told that if the cauterization didn’t work, they’d have to take me in an ambulance to a bigger hospital in a different city. I’m glad that didn’t happen because I would have been mortified to cause all that trouble for a mere nosebleed. Hell, I was already mortified.

I didn’t bother return to class. Instead, I went straight home and collapsed onto the bed in my bloody clothes. I slept for a good twelve or so hours.

I haven’t had a nosebleed since.

Cover photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash