--- title: A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose description: Doctors say a woman in London fractured her eye socket — called an orbital blowout — by blowing her nose, according to a BMJ case report. canonical: https://time.com/5329219/blow-your-nose-injury/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-07-03T15:15:49.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T20:45:29.121Z article:section: Health og:title: A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose og:description: Her doctor had never seen anything like it og:url: https://time.com/5329219/blow-your-nose-injury/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt596243bbc95ce1db/69888b09a988caa33a6b6fcc/the-science-of-crying-fb.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2800 og:image:height: 1575 og:image:alt: the-science-of-crying-fb og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose twitter:description: Her doctor had never seen anything like it twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt596243bbc95ce1db/69888b09a988caa33a6b6fcc/the-science-of-crying-fb.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Jul 3, 2018 3:15 PM UTC  Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Margit Jones for TIME  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Jul 3, 2018 3:15 PM UTC 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_](http://casereports.bmj.com/content/2018/bcr-2018-224633.abstract). 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.” It’s fairly easy to fracture some small facial bones, but it’s “very rare” such a thing would happen from blowing your nose, says Myers. It’s not entirely clear why the woman got so unlucky—she told doctors she hadn’t blown her nose exceptionally hard, and she was otherwise healthy—but Myers speculates that she “must have had a predisposition or a weakening in the skeletal area around the eye” that simply gave way. The woman also smoked about 20 cigarettes a day, which Myers says may have played a part. “If you close the other nostril and then blow, sometimes that pressure can be quite a lot,” Myers says. “But for the amount of pressure from her blowing her nose to be equal to a punch, that’s quite incredible.” Still, the woman’s case turned out to be relatively simple to treat: The fracture was clean, her vision wasn’t permanently affected and she did not require surgery. Doctors sent her on her way with painkillers and directions to temporarily avoid blowing her nose or playing contact sports, and to cut back on smoking. She has recovered well in the year since the accident, though she reported a lingering side effect: daily pain on the left side of her face lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. 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. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5329219/blow-your-nose-injury/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5329219/blow-your-nose-injury/"},"headline":"A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose","datePublished":"2018-07-03T15:15:49.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T20:45:29.121Z","description":"Her doctor had never seen anything like it","url":"https://time.com/5329219/blow-your-nose-injury/","keywords":["medicine","onetime","healthytime"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt596243bbc95ce1db/69888b09a988caa33a6b6fcc/the-science-of-crying-fb.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jamie Ducharme","jobTitle":"Ducharme is a contributor to TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt596243bbc95ce1db/69888b09a988caa33a6b6fcc/the-science-of-crying-fb.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"the-science-of-crying-fb","caption":"the-science-of-crying-fb","creditText":"Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Margit Jones for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/medicine/","name":"medicine"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5329219/blow-your-nose-injury/","name":"A Woman Fractured Her Eye Socket By Blowing Her Nose"}}]}] ```