Cru Jones Society

This is part three of our three-part series “How It Feels.” Today, our own walking accident, Senor Limon, gives you the skinny how what it’s like to have your schnozz busted up and to have your father summarily dismiss your concerns about it.

We’ve documented the fact that I’m basically a walking accident waiting to happen (Ed. note: See?), and considering all the things that have happened to me, breaking my nose when I was 13 really doesn’t rank all that highly on my list of painful experiences. But the event and the activities immediately surrounding it were really pretty strange. It was also the only occasion in my life that something I’ve done has actually resulted in a broken bone.

I remember vividly being 13 years old, spending a summer weekday afternoon the way I spent many of my summer weekday afternoons, attending baseball practice.  I was warming up for practice throwing the ball back and forth with a kid whose nickname “Gator” was so prevalent I’m fairly sure 99% of the people who knew him didn’t know his real name until about high school when he decided he didn’t really want to be known by his nickname for the rest of his life.  Gator and I had probably traded less than a dozen throws, and were still tossing the ball lightly back and forth in the early stages of warming up, when a baseball that wasn’t particularly hard thrown glanced off the top of my glove and smacked me directly between the eyes.  I knew even in the brief four or five seconds that came before my nose began gushing blood uncontrollably from both nostrils, that my nose was broken.

In retrospect, the incident was the result of a combination of the distraction created by my friend Adam’s and my deep conversation about robots, and the more pressing concern of a decline in my vision, which, between approximately the ages of 12 and 18, went from perfect 20/20 like most every kid around me, to a state of effective blindness where I had to squint to make out the big E on the vision chart on my frequent visits to the eye doctor where my prescription changed for the worse every six months I went back for a visit. I could no longer even read the time on my digital bedside clock without first reaching across the nightstand to locate my glasses.  Fortunately the miracle of LASIK surgery means that I, like Dagger no longer have to deal with the constant annoyance of wearing contact lenses.

Back on point, after being smacked in the face, I immediately staggered over to my father, who was also the head coach of our baseball team and declared that I had just broken my nose, as I soon soaked blood completely through two washcloths before the carnage finally abated.  My dad, in a fashion typical for him, soon ignored me and went back to running the practice. I meanwhile sat on the sideline woozy and nauseous due to the fact that what seemed like gallons of my blood had been displaced from where it belonged in my circulatory system, onto the ground, and into my stomach, where my body most assuredly decided that it was unwelcome.

To add insult to injury, after practice was finally over, despite several of my requests to have a doctor look at my broken nose, my dad not only refused to take me to the doctor, but had decided that he would force me to accompany him to some kind of pizza dinner for baseball coaches. I was still wearing my gear from baseball practice, including my shirt that was now largely covered in a steadily drying dark red blood stain from my collar down and proceeded to apologize to everyone who I talked to that I wasn’t quite my normal self that evening because I had recently been smacked in the face with a baseball.  When I complained that I really needed to go home and lay down because I was nauseous and light headed, my dad responded by forcing me to eat two cold and slightly stale squares of pizza from Little Caesars, which were left over from when dinner had been served earlier that evening.

My broken nose would go undiagnosed for approximately three weeks until in a remarkably similar incident, I was smacked in the cheekbone by a fly ball I was attempting to catch during a pre-game warm up drill.  This particular incident lead to the swelling of my cheekbone that was both so rapid and severe,  my dad (I’m sure after considerable internal debate on the merits of making me suffer for 7 innings in the dugout) acquiesced and drove me to the emergency room leaving the team in the care of my Grandfather who was the assistant coach.

It’s worth noting at this juncture that despite how it may appear, I am actually a reasonably talented baseball player. It’s just kind of hard to catch a baseball when you can’t see it.

After a relatively short stay in the ER waiting room, I was ushered back for x-rays as I continued to apply an ice pack to my swollen cheek, and still sore nose from my prior encounter with a baseball. I separated from my dad as the nurses asked me a few questions until they were convinced that my injuries were indeed the result of wayward baseballs as I had claimed and not some kind of child abuse. Upon reviewing my x-rays, the doctor informed me and my dad that my cheek would be fine, but my nose was in fact broken. My dad limply proclaimed that he thought it may have been, but “knew” that they couldn’t have done anything for it anyway until the swelling went down. Whatever the hell that meant.

I was sent home with a referral to a specialist who would be tasked with fixing my crooked broken nose. Fortunately for me the break was still fresh and my bones weren’t quite brittle yet and my nose could be fixed without need of the common practice of re-breaking it with some kind of hammer in order to straighten it back out.

Within a couple weeks I reported to the plastic surgeon’s office to have my broken nose set, which was an unnerving procedure to say the least.  The doctor came in to the exam room and took a quick look at my nose before sending my dad down the hall to the pharmacy to fetch some anesthetic which arrived in the form of a syringe and a liquid dose of cocaine. I’m not usually bad with needles, and from what I hear it was definitely for the best that I couldn’t really see what was going on as the Doctor inserted an inch long needle into my face directly between my eyes before probing around as he injected anesthetic into the area just under my skin.  Next, he poured some of the liquid cocaine into a cotton ball and told me to snort. As I inhaled it, most of my face went instantaneously numb to include the back of my throat as the anesthetic traveled downward. Strange sensation for a 13 year-old to say the least…

Next, the doctor performed one of the least elegant medical procedures I have ever been party to.  He braced one of his hands on the back of my head and used the other to yank to the right until he was satisfied that my nose was relatively straight. I could hear my nose moving around and was dimly aware of it shifting, but fortunately thanks to the plentiful anesthesia I didn’t feel a thing.

Within a few weeks my nose was relatively healed, but it’s still crooked.

Mailto: senor.limon@crujonessociety.com