Oh ho, yes, old sport. Next time you find yourself wiping an errant nostril on a sleeve or reaching for an aloe soaked Kleenex in order to have a cleansing blow, think back to poor old Joe Nagy and take yourself immediately to the nearest emergency room, because you could be leaking brain fluid, sucker!
Yes, a man who had suffered for years with what he thought were chronic allergies had to have emergency surgery in the last week to plug a minute hole between his nasal cavity and the inside of his skull.
Nagy, a native of Phoenix, Arizona, first noticed the problem when he woke up one morning literally gushing (for lack of a better/less disgusting word) as the man himself explained to CBS.
“Brooop! [sic] This clear liquid dribbled out of my nose like tears out of your eyes. I go, ‘What is this?’”
What, indeed. Aside from the thoroughly stomach churning concept, it would seem Mr Nagy, being a man (amiright ladies?) put off going to the doctor for years until the frequency and quantity of the leaking had gotten so bad as to impact every aspect of his life.
The problem came to a head while at work, when Mr Nagy reached across some blueprints to grab a model airplane (I assume he works in a hobby shop or something…)
“It was about a teaspoon full [of the liquid],” he recalled. “Splashed all over the top sheet … I said, ‘These damn allergies.’”
He added, “I was embarrassed as hell.”
When the problem refused to go away with allergy and flu medication, Nagy finally consulted a physician and was naturally horrified at the diagnosis.
“I was scared to death if you want to know the truth.”
You’ll not hear me blaming you for that, Joe!
The doctor who ended up plugging Mr Nagy’s brain hole, also explained to CBS how it was possible for Mr Nagy to have such a potentially serious affliction and yet still be on to go on with his life.
“These leaks can be very very tiny, a little like a puncture on a bicycle tire, that sometimes you have trouble even finding where it is,” Dr Peter Nakaji noted, adding that the brain replenishes its supply by making 12 ounces of brain fluid per day.
Surgery was delayed briefly when poor old Mr Nagy got a rather nasty bout of Meningitis (brain swelling) but after recovering from that, Dr Nakaji and his team plugged the hole rather ingeniously.
“Nowadays we do quite a bit of surgery on the brain and base of brain through the nose. We never have to cut up into the brain. We’re getting a needle up into the space to check it out, and then to put a little bit of glue. This is just a bit of cartilage from the nose that we can get to repair over it and then the body will seal it up.”
Now Mr Nagy is foot loose and hankie free, joy o’ joys!
Still, nobody wants a teaspoon of spino-brain fluid running out of their nose, that sort of shit gives me the heebies!
