Last summer I had a bit of a mishap. The rate at which I healed (much faster than any of the doctors expected) is a testament to the power of alternative medicine.

Last year, exactly one year ago yesterday (July 31st), I literally broke my face (those of you who attend the local farm markets may have noticed me missing for a couple of weeks). To make a very long story short, my brother and I clocked heads while running at full speed, putting me in the hospital with multiple facial fractures, broken sinuses, and eyes so black I looked like a zombie.

I was told I’d need to have surgery and metal plates in my face, but I chose to hold off on that and instead took the alternative medicine route. I began an intense series of chi-gong, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy treatments and in just a couple months, nobody could even tell anything had ever happened.

The only residual effects of the accident are that I still don’t have all my usual energy back yet, there’s always going to be a small hole in the side of nose bone, and a few of my teeth are still numb where my brother’s head crushed a nerve in my face, and even those are slowly healing. I still haven’t had to have a single surgery, despite what I’d been told in the ER, and I credit it to my alternative medicine treatments.

So to make a long story long, here’s the full misadventure story:
My brother and I were invited over to our younger cousin’s house to an airsoft party he was having. Though it was a get-ready-for-market night for me, I told him I’d pop over for 20 minutes or so. It ended up being 20 minutes too long.

After a few rounds of airsoft, we decided that before I went back to my flower bouquets, we’d  play a couple quick rounds of Bloody Werewolf (It also goes by the name of Ghost in the Graveyard, The Witch Ain’t Out Tonight, and Bloody Murder as well as a slew of other names. Basically it’s like hide and seek in reverse and played outside at night). On the 3rd round, we decided to spice things up by having two werewolves, myself and my brother.

In a short time everyone had made it to the safety zone except Hunter, so my brother and I were both chasing him from either direction. When he jumped out of the way, my brother and I banged heads like two pachesephlesoaurouses, with his forehead barreling right into my eyesocket. Both of us can run pretty fast so we had a lot of force behind our hit. We hit so hard in fact that the force of our heads hitting actually burst a hole in my brother’s bandanna.

We’d been running so fast, I never even had time to see my brother’s head coming at me. All I saw was the big white flash at the same time I heard (and felt) the thunk of our head collision. Or as Hunter put it, he’d never heard anything crack like that when two people’s hit heads (I’d later learn that cracking sound was my face shattering).

Not surprisingly, my brother and I immediately fell to the ground groaning in pain. I was close to unconsciousness, but in the back of my mind, I was worried that if I lost consciousness, I might lose my sight (which I know makes absolutely no sense, but after all I had just been hit really hard in the head, so I was bound to be thinking illogically).

The first thing I noticed (aside from the exploding pain in my face) was that my jaw didn’t line up anymore. The second thing I noticed was all the blood pouring out of my face. There was actually a hole in the side of my nose where the bone was broken and the blood was just pouring out of it. As I sat in a chair trying to soak up the seemingly unending supply of blood with towel, I jokingly stated that I might need a blood transfusion before the night was done (I rarely lose my dry sense of humor, even while blood is spewing out of my face).

My aunt drove me to urgent care. I was in so much pain by that time that I was shaking and my brother had to help me get to the door (I didn’t know it yet at the time, but I had 16 fractures in my face from the collision, so I guess pain was a reasonable thing to be feeling). My brother was actually fine physically. All he’d received was a little scratch on the forehead (or as I told him, proof that he’s hard-headed). The mental beating he took was far worse. I felt bad for him, because he felt so bad about it, even though it had all been just a freak accident.

Unfortunately, urgent care had closed about an hour before, and that was too much for me. I collapsed realizing I’d have to go all the way back to town, but my brother helped me back out to the car and my aunt drove the 15 minutes (it seems like an eternity when you have a broken face) to the emergency room at the local hospital. My brother basically had to carry me in at that point while my aunt checked me in with the guy at the counter. They gave me the brief hand test to make sure I was coherent (I kept making jokes trying to make my brother feel better, so the ER guy probably thought I’d totally lost it).

I waited in the emergency room for what seemed like forever (it probably wasn’t, but I was in a lot of pain, so it seemed like it). After a little bit, my entire body went numb and I started breathing hard and shaking. After years of migraines, I’ve learned that that’s my body’s natural reaction to very intense pain, but the guy at the desk didn’t think it was good, and kept telling me I had to calm to down (if I could have, I would have, but I can’t control it when my body goes numb). He tried grabbing on to me to get me to “calm down” and stop shaking, but my brother slapped his hand away, knowing it was only going to make me worse (he’d seen me with enough migraines over the years).

After a few minutes I was able to catch my breath, the numbness in my body subsided, and it stopped shaking. I was still in intense pain, but it had stopped increasing and was just holding at that level, so my body/brain was able to process it better while I sat there waiting to see a doctor. All the while the blood from my face was pouring into the pan in front of me and trickling down the back of my throat. Eventually enough of it went down my throat that it made me sick to my stomach and I threw it all back up. (They get you in to see a doctor really fast once you start throwing up blood.)

After the preliminary questions (answers peppered with some more of my dry humor), they put one of those neck brace things on me. I was pretty sure I didn’t have any problem with my neck, as all the damage had been directed at my eye area, but they put it on anyway to make sure. That was understandable. What wasn’t understandable was that the neck brace was also about 3 sizes too big, which I tried explaining, but nobody seemed to believe me (what did I know, I was just the person feeling it grinding into the back of my injured head).

Then I got a round of xrays and an MRI that revealed I had 16 facial fractures, several of them being solid breaks all the way through the bones, and both my sinuses had been shattered along with my nose. They said it was amazing that I didn’t have a concussion, though with the big white light I saw at impact, they figured I’d probably had one initially, and that it was just gone by the time I got to the emergency room (I’ve always been a fast healer, my sister even suggested I should go as Wolverine for Halloween because if it).

The doctors were worried about one spot in the MRI that it might be bleeding in the back of the brain, so they called for an ambulance to ship me up to the city hospital. The first thing the EMPs said when they came to load me into the ambulance was that the collar around my neck was way too big for me (just as I had tried to explain earlier). On the ride to the hospital, the EMPs asked me how it had happened, so I explained the whole hide and seek thing, which would soon become a running joke among the medical personal, since there’s not much that sounds more harmless than hide and seek right?

When I got to the city hospital they gave me an IV with some much needed pain medication and put a few stitches in my nose. After a while they did another MRI to check the spot from the first one, and fortunately it ended up not being bleeding in the brain. I was, however, told that I would need to have surgery.

They wanted to put two metal plates in my face, and they actually wanted to do it that very night. By that point in time it was 3AM, my nose was still bleeding, my face was all swelled up, and I was absolutely exhausted. I declined the surgery and they said they could do it the following weekend. (I think they may have just wanted to use me as guinea pig, since it’s a learning hospital). Then they left me to get some sleep. Sleep, however, was not meant to be.

Even though I now had a collar on that was the right size, it was still very uncomfortable. Having used up most of my pain tolerance that night, I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it, so when the nurses left, I took it off (or rather had my mother and brother take it off, since I had needles in both arms and couldn’t really bend them very well). I still couldn’t sleep, however, because there were so many dinging noises in the ER it felt like being in the middle of a Nintendo game. My nose also bled for a quite a while still, which kept me from resting.

By morning all I wanted to do was go home and sleep in my own bed. So by late morning they let me check out and sent me home with a prescription for one of those strong painkillers (whose name I forget) telling me that I might not be able to take it because it makes some people sick. Yup, it made me sick. They gave me basically no instructions for how to care for my broken face, unless you count the generic sheet they send home with everybody, reminding me I should wear a helmet to protect my face if I go motorcycle riding. Seriously? Anybody whose face is broken in 16 places should NOT be riding a motorcycle.

So since I didn’t get any decent care instructions from the hospital, I came up with my own care regimen of alternating a frozen bag of peas and a hot washcloth on my face to try and take down the swelling. By that time my face was swelled up to at least twice its normal size, one of my eyes was almost swelled shut, and the area around my eyes was so black and blue they looked fake. It looked like someone had just taken a bunch of eyeshadow and smeared it all around my eyes (I probably scared the dickens out of that one guy who knocked on the door and I answered it).

However, my sister had a great time documenting my progress by taking photos of my zombie-looking face everyday. I was also taking aspirin for the pain because I couldn’t stomach the prescription pain-killer. If I’d thought more about it, I probably would have realized aspirin was a bad idea, but I’d been hit hard in the head and I was sleep deprived, so I wasn’t really thinking clearly, and no one at the city hospital had bothered to tell me not to take aspirin for the pain.

I couldn’t sleep in my own bed because when I laid flat, the broken bones in my face would start to separate and it was extremely painful, so I ended up spending my nights at my recently deceased grandmother’s apartment. She had one of those adjustable beds that I could sleep somewhat upright in. (I think she’d have been glad to know it was still getting some use).

Before the accident I’d already had some of my bouquets made and my family was nice enough to take them down to the farm market where my vendor neighbors, the ladies of Newbury Park Pastries were wonderful enough to set them up and sell them for me in my absence.

Five days after my initial accident, I went to see my acupuncturist. She gave me a treatment (though she couldn’t put many needles in my face obviously) and by 8:00 that night I could feel the swelling quickly go down in my face (my body has always reacted very quickly to acupuncture treatments), and my nose visibly straightened in response to the swelling going down. Since that was a Tuesday, and I was feeling so good, I’d gone ahead and gotten a few flowers picked with the help of my wonderful family. I had the intent of going to the farm market the next day. At midnight, however, my nose began to bleed.

It wasn’t a normal bloody nose where you can just pinch it until it stops, it was coming from further up in my head. It was probably all that stale blood that had been swelled up in my face needing a place to go and the only way out was the nose. It would have been a good thing (I can’t tell you how much better my face felt with all that swelling and stale blood gone down), except for the fact that it didn’t stop. My nose just kept on bleeding. I have a hunch now that my blood was probably thin from the aspirin I’d been taking and it couldn’t clot itself back up. So it kept bleeding for several hours.

My poor aunt sat up with me as we waited for my nose to stop bleeding, but it never did. It just kept on bleeding, some of it bleeding out in actual chunks. What didn’t bleed out my nose was going down the back of my throat. I was so tired from the ordeal and kept trying to go to sleep, but my nose just kept bleeding. By morning I was completely exhausted and my nose was still bleeding. My mother drove me back to the local hospital ER where they put what they called a Rhino Rocket in my nose to stop the bleeding, then sent me back up to the city hospital again for further treatment.

When I got to the city hospital, they put me a room, put the needle in my arm but never ended up giving me an IV. Two doctors gave me a look over and said they were going to go put their heads together and figure out how to stop the bleeding. They never came back.

I was basically abandoned in the room. My face was still painful (16 fractures don’t exactly heal over night). And since they hadn’t hooked the needle in my arm up to anything, I didn’t have any fluids or even pain medication either.

No one had checked my vitals (if they had, they might have realized how low my blood pressure was) and while that rhino rocket in my nose stopped some of the blood from coming out my nose, the blood just went down the back of my throat instead, meaning that every few minutes I’d get sick to my stomach and throw up a puddle of blood into the pan. After a couple hours of that, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went out into the hall to find one of the doctors (since they hadn’t ever come back in the room) and told her I needed that thing taken out of my nose.

They removed it and my nose started bleeding again, but at least I wasn’t choking on blood down the back of my throat anymore. Then the doctor abandoned me once again, still with no IV, no pain medication, and no one taking my vitals. It was afternoon by that time.

I hadn’t eaten anything since supper the night before, and I’m slightly hypoglycemic, but they wouldn’t let me eat or drink anything. So I sat there shaky, hungry, thirsty, in pain, with my nose heavily bleeding, extremely exhausted, but still unable to get any sleep because of all the Nintendo-like dinging noises outside the curtain in the hallway. And still, no doctor trying to stop the bleeding in my nose.

After a couple more hours I was so uncomfortable and in so much pain I was practically in tears. I decided to check myself out since I wasn’t getting any care at the city hospital anyway. My aunt was planning to drop the flowers I’d done off at the market, since I was too busy bleeding to death in a hospital to attend market, so I called her and asked her if she could come up to the city and pick my mother and I up afterward so I could just go home. She left the flowers with the market manager, Natalie, who was nice enough to set them up and sell them for me. Then my aunt came to pick me up.

Naturally the hospital advised against me leaving because the ENT doctors hadn’t seen me yet. (They hadn’t even called the ENT doctors up for me yet, even after all the hours I’d been sitting there without treatment). So I told them my aunt was on the way to pick me up, which would be about an hour, and if they could get the ENT doctors in to see me before my aunt got there, then I’d stay for the ENTs, otherwise I was going home to be comfortable. Of course I had to sign something saying they weren’t responsible for me if anything happened to me after I left, but at that point I figured if I was going to die, I might as well be comfortable while I was doing it. They weren’t being very responsible for me while I was there anyway.

It’s amazing how fast you get a response when you threaten to leave. Even though I was already signed out by that point, they called the ENT doctors who came right down. They ended up packing my nose to try and stop the bleeding, which was one of the most painful experience of my life, but at least I knew the ENT doctors were trying to help me (which is more than I can say for the two who abandoned me in the room). They had to basically take a long pair of thin pliers with what looked like a string of dental floss (actually a string coated with some kind of numbing medication) and shove that way up my nose to numb it. I still gag thinking about it.

Then once that was numbed, they packed a whole bunch of cotton-like packing in my nose as high up as they could get it. Miraculously it did slow the bleeding almost to a stop. I was in more pain now than ever, however (the numbing stuff is very temporary so it wasn’t long before I felt the effects of having cotton shoved into my already broken nose), so I decided that since I was already signed out anyway, it was still best to go home. The ENT doctors were the only ones who’d given me any care there so far anyway (even then no one had taken my vitals or hooked the needle in my arm up to an IV), and it’d simply be more quiet and comfortable at home. So when my aunt arrived a little while later, I went back to Gramma’s apartment.

The ride home was bumpy, being an hour long, and unfortunately by the time I got there, my nose was bleeding again. I couldn’t go back to the city hospital, however, because I was just too tired. Exhausted is not a strong enough word to describe how I felt. I spent one of the most miserable nights of my life lying on one side, then the other, while holding wads of kleenex over my bleeding nose (the packing had long since washed out), and every now and again spitting up big chunks of blood. Needless to say I got very little sleep.

By the next morning, there was so much blood all over the bedroom it looked, as my sister put it, like someone had been brutally murdered there. I was in real trouble by that time. I had already passed out once and my aunt was spoon-feeding me broth because I didn’t have the strength to do it myself. When I passed out the second time I had my mother and aunts lay me face down (on the non-broken side of my face of course) on the floor to regulate my blood pressure so I wouldn’t pass out again. It was something I’d learned from my years of choking people out in Judo class.

They called an ambulance to pick me up. My heart rate was up to 160 and my blood pressure was down to 65/50 and falling. The ambulance wanted to take me back to the local hospital, but I was worried the local hospital would ship me back up to city hospital again. I knew if that happened, the city hospital would probably kill me, since I was in my current predicament because of their previous failure to give me any care. Even lying half-dead on the ground, I was adamant about not being sent back to that city hospital. So they ended up taking me back to the local hospital with the understanding that I was not to be sent up to the city hospital.

The ambulance people were quite worried about me, but I wasn’t afraid of dying for myself. I was afraid that if I died it would destroy my brother, since he felt guilty for putting me in the hospital, even though it hadn’t actually been his fault. So I just kept telling myself that I had to stay alive for him.

When I got to the hospital, they started giving me blood transfusions (so thank you very much to all the A+ blood donors out there). The blood was so cold when they started putting it in me that I began shivering. For months afterward, whenever I got chilly in the middle of the night while sleeping, I dreamed that I was receiving a blood transfusion.

The doctors wanted to ship me back up to the city hospital, but I was absolutely not going back to that hospital. Eventually they agreed to take me to a different hospital, Rochester General, and I cannot say enough good things about that hospital. The care I received at Rochester General was wonderful, especially in comparison to the other hospital.

After I’d received two units of blood at the local hospital, they loaded me into an ambulance with a third unit of blood and shipped me up to Rochester General. They told me that Rochester General was the third busiest ER in New York (if I recall correctly), but you’d never know it, they handled everything so well. There was no irritating dinging out in the hallway, and unlike the other city hospital, the Rochester General personal actually checked my vitals; every couple hours in fact. They tried to get my records sent over from the other city hospital, but for some reason the other city hospital couldn’t find me in their system (though I noticed they didn’t have any trouble finding me in the system when it was time to start sending the bills).

The doctors at Rochester General couldn’t stop the bleeding in my nose, but they kept giving me blood until it stopped on its own. I ended up receiving two more units of blood while I was there, bringing it up to five units total, and for a while they considered giving me a sixth.

That night was another difficult one, as I had an IV in my arm, so every time I turned over holding a kleenex on my nose, I had to be careful not to unplug anything. But by the next morning, my nose had finally stopped bleeding. (That was when I really looked like a zombie, with yellow and black eyes and dried blood all down my face). I ended up sounding a bit like Rudolph for a few days, because my nose was stopped up with dried blood.

The hospital kept me another day for observation and then let me go home Saturday morning. They told me I would still need surgery to fix my sinuses, but they wanted to wait a few weeks until all the swelling had gone down (unlike the other city hospital that had wanted to operate immediately and use me as a learning experiment for someone). In the meantime I began my intense series of chi-gong, acupuncture, and craniosacrel therapy treatments.

With these alternative medicine treatments, the dark colors around my eyes quickly disappeared. Within a few weeks my jaw realigned itself to its proper position. My bones fused themselves back together the way they should be. I got the feeling back into most of my teeth within a few weeks. And my sinuses healed wonderfully with a little chi-gong and acupuncture help. I even got 100% of my sense of smell back, despite the sinuses being shattered.

The conventional doctors were amazed at how fast I’d recovered. They’d never seen anyone heal that fast from something like that without surgery. I ended up never having the surgery that the doctors were so sure I’d need, and to this day, my sinuses are just fine. Pretty good going from an initial diagnoses of surgery and metal plates to not having a single surgical cut, and almost no visible traces of what had happened.

I’ve always known alternative medicine was powerful, but my little misadventure really showed me just how powerful it can really be. It’s not just fluff. This stuff really does work, and I credit it with putting me back to normal without ever needing surgery.

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Disclaimer:
The information provided on this website is merely opinion. I am not a medical doctor or a scientist and this information should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult your own doctor for medical advice. The information on this website is intended for informational purposes only. The information on this website should not be used for treatment or medical diagnosis. Always seek professional medical advice from your doctor before beginning any new practices.

Written by Amber Reifsteck, The Woodland Elf

The information provided on this website is for general information purposes only. If you choose to rely on the information on this website, you do so at your own risk and you assume responsibility for the results. (Full disclaimer here)

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