The recent death of Karl Malden got me thinking about this, as the broken nose he suffered when young left him with a distinctive, er, character actor’s face.
Can a broken nose heal to look 100% normal again, or is the delicacy of the sinus-area bones and cartilage such that the injury will always be apparent? Does it have to be a more serious break to permanently leave its mark?
If a person could reliably prevent their turning over while sleeping, could they largely ensure a cosmetically satisfactory healing?
My father was thrown off a cliff by a skidding bus. His car was totalled, but the only damage Dad suffered was a broken nose which healed just fine, the cops pulling him out of the car couldn’t believe his luck. His nose looked like Bob Hope’s before the accident and it looked like Bob Hope’s when the bandages came off. Now, whether having a nose like Bob Hope’s is a cosmetically-satisfactory result or not, I’ll leave to the esteemed audience.
I suspect many of those broken-nosed guys never got proper medical care: Dad did.
Holy crap! Good for your father and his nose… it sounds like he had some incredibly good luck surviving an accident he was incredibly unlucky to suffer in the first place. Nice how those odds sometimes largely cancel each other out, huh?
I went to an ENT doctor last year for some sinus/allergy problems. He asked me if I had ever broken my nose. I told him no. He looked at it and told me it looked straight from the outside. However, when he took his scope and looked at it from the inside, he told me that I had a deviated septum–caused by a broken nose which had long since healed! I can remember no time when I think I might have broken my nose. He says that it probably happened in childhood or when I was a teenager, probably playing sports, and that it’s relatively common among men and getting more common in younger women who grew up playing sports as girls. He said children often shake such injuries off. I honestly cannot remember any blow to the nose that even was tender the next day.
My father and sister think he’s full of crap, because they’ve been diagnosed with the same thing–only their doctors never told them they’d broken anything.
So, I don’t know about “heal properly”, since things are obviously wrong on the inside, but from the outside, you’d never have any idea. Of course, given I can’t remember the injury at all, that may not be saying much.