Breaking my nose

I never did get around to posting about how I broke my nose in September, although I posted a picture of my cast here.
It was pretty simple, really.  I had the kids at the park on a Saturday morning.  Everything went well for almost an hour.  Isaac started to get bored so I offered to push him in the swing.  He urged me to push him faster and faster, until he achieved Maximum Four-year-old Velocity.

Then Corinna saw something that caught her attention and ran right in front of him.

I stopped Isaac before he hit her.  Unfortunately I stopped him by grabbing his butt, and his head continued its backswing right into my nose.

The world exploded and I immediately started dripping blood, both from the inside of my nose and the outside.  Meanwhile Isaac was whining that I hurt his head, so I tried to bleed into the woodchips with him in one arm and Corinna in the other.  (I wasn't entirely successful in aiming for the woochips. Isaac also complained that I got some on him.)

It hurt like hell, so I had to squat there for a minute while things stopped throbbing quite so much.  Then I went to the bathroom to wipe some of the blood off.

I rounded up the kids and took them to the donut shop, because damn it, I wanted to get Rachel donuts and breakfast tacos and this wasn't going to stop me.  The donut shop lady didn't say anything, which kind of surprised me.

At home, Rachel confirmed that my nose was indeed crooked.  "Maybe I should just leave it alone and let it heal," I said.  "It's starting to hurt less."  "You need to get that fixed!  It really looks bad!"  "Wouldn't you still love me with a crooked nose?"  "Get it fixed."

So I went to an urgent care clinic up the road.  The doctor charged me $200 for x-rays to "make sure it was broken" and then told me he couldn't do anything about it.  Our conversation was brief:

Quack: "You don't look happy about this."
Me: "It was obvious my nose is broken.  This is bullshit."
Quack: "I'm sorry you're upset.  But you don't need to use language like that."

I didn't tell him to FOAD but I wanted to.

On Monday I went to an ENT who (after sending away for the official Nose-straightening Tool, which looked like a somewhat thick butter knife) stuck it up the left sinus and got busy.  This actually didn't hurt much because first she'd given me six Novocaine injections, all the way down to the bone. THAT hurt.

She did a good job.  You can still see an asymmetry if you look closely but Rachel is happy with it.

Postscript: the following Saturday, I was swinging Isaac at the park again. "Slow, Dad! Slow!" he urged me. "No hurt nose!"