After a particularly violent sneeze last night, I opened my eyes to find a sizeable spray of blood on my hands and the bathroom wall. While it was definitely a festive bright red, it and the stream that ran out of my nose for the next three or so minutes were startling to say the least (funny how little things take one a bit more importance when you live by yourself and have no one within a few rooms to notice if you pass out from blood loss).
Now, head forward or back? And are there any other things I can do to stop such a flow, should it happen again?
He weathered a firestorm of agony and did not break.
And while Yori raged against his unbending
courage, we took Kyuden Hiruma back.
His loss is great, but so is the gift his suffering brought.
-Yakamo’s Funeral
I get spontaneous nose bleeds on occasion…I find that it happens more this time of year when the air is cold and dry. This is a wag but probably the mucus in your nose dries out and doesn’t protect the tiny veins inside your nose as well as it does in the summer time. I don’t know where you live but check into that.
As far as stopping the bleeding, I have heard it all I think from placing a nickel between your upper front teeth and your upper lip to reading bible verses. I think the best treatment is to just put some toilet paper gently in the side of your nose that is bleeding and keep your head level, change it out with clean tissue as needed. Refrain from looking down and sooner or later the blood is gonna clot and your nose will stop bleeding. Ain’t no way to keep it from gettin funky just wait for a few hours and blow out the dried blood. Rinse and repeat.
Wait till you get my bill,
Dr. Aha
Of course that’s just my opinion I could be wrong.
Dennis Miller
Generally no intervention is necessary, but the pressure inside blood vessels in your head is lower than in you fet when you are sitting/standing upright.
Pointing your nose to the ceiling accentuates this difference in pressures slightly, but has the unpleasant side effect of causing the blood to drip down your throat necessitating swallowing the blood.
Since a majority of bleeds come from vessels over the septum (cartilage separating the two sides of your nose), pinching the sides of your nose against the septum may help to stop the bleeding more quickly. Sticking anything up there is not advisable since it may disrupt the platelet clot that will stop the bleeding.
In medical school, I was subjected to the same bad joke repeatedly:
As someone who has suffered from nosebleeds for 30 years (not often nowadays – usually when I have a cold), I’ve had plenty of time to experiment.
For me, the best way is to keep your head up and press the side of your nose to stop the bleeding (about where you first can feel the bone). This is slow to stop, but one it stops, you rarely have a recurrence. As the blood flow slows, inhale through the nose to get more oxygen to increase clotting.
If you tilt your head back, it does seem to clot sooner, but it doesn’t stay fixed for quite so long. Also, you end up swallowing a lot of blood.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
And buy salt water spray from your pharmacy. Honk that into your nose a couple of times a day while the house is dry. Inexpensive, drug free and non-irritating.
Head forward, deffently. Had one patient who projectile vomited in the back of my ambulance because he insisted on holding his head back instead of forward. There was nothing to do, no where to hide, just duck and cover as the vomit hit the roof of the ambulance and sprayed over the entire inside
I too suffer from frequent spontaneous nosebleeds. Usually they stop after a minute or so but the worst was one a year or so ago that showed no signs of slowing after fifteen or twenty minutes. It got so bad that my sinuses filled with blood and blood started seeping from the corners of my eyes. That was scary!
A physician’s assistant who was in the building had me pinch my nose, as others here have directed, and go to the emergency room. (No, I didn’t drive myself.)
The ER doc recommended using a nasal decongestant spray next time. And he was definitely in favor of head forward. I fainted in the examining room – not from loss of blood but from having swallowed so much blood.
p.s. A good way to get fast service in the ER is to come in covered with blood.
“To do her justice, I can’t see that she could have found anything nastier to say if she’d thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.”
Dorothy L. Sayers Busman’s Honeymoon
