This Woman’s Runny Nose Was Actually Spinal Fluid [ Must Read]

This Woman’s Runny Nose Was Actually Spinal Fluid

52-year-old Kendra Jackson from Omaha, Nebraska, had been suffering from a runny nose for quite some time. Her runny nose occurred two and a half years after she got into a serious car accident, but doctors didn’t see any correlation – they just put it down to allergies, however Jackson knew it was more than just that.

Her runny nose started to worsen in 2015, “When it didn’t go away, I kept going back and forth to the doctors, and they prescribed every kind of medicine you can think of, and my nose just kept on running,” she said. After having a runny nose for more than two years, she went to see physicians at the University of Nebraska Medical Center earlier this year, and learned the real reason behind it.

The physicians discovered that her nasal discharge was actually cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), leaking from a small hole in her skull that occurred when she had the crash. A rhinologist at the medical center, Dr. Christie Barnes, said “She would wake up in the morning after sleeping upright in a chair, and the whole front of her shirt was wet with fluid. It was a lot of fluid.”

CSF surrounds the brain, cushioning it from impacts with the skull, and losing CSF can cause minor head injuries to have the potential to be fatal. Jackson was losing about 500 milliliters of CSF per day. The CSF was leaking from a tiny hole in her cribriform plate, a thin piece of bone that separates the cranial and nasal cavities – thinner than a potato chip.

CSF leaks are rare, occurring in 1 in 20,000 people every year, but they are often relatively easy to fix. In the past, surgery would have been done through the top of the skull, posing all of the risks that ordinary brain surgery has, however new techniques have been developed that allow surgeons to go through the nostrils. Surgeons at the University of Nebraska Medical Center plugged the hole in Jackson’s cribriform plate using tissue from her nose and fat from abdomen.

A month after the surgery, Jackson has said that the CSF leakage has stopped, but is still getting headaches – which began after her crash.

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