Making matters worse for the beak, the bone that makes up the top portion of the bridge is lighter and thinner than the surrounding skull. When you look at an X-ray, you can see this extremely fragile projection of bone sticking out. It’s very delicate and very pretty, but it also can be damaged very easily.
If there is one bad rap that’s been hung on the nose, it’s the general belief that a single fracture can instantly turn the average GQ man into the average Elephant Man, complete with the ability to drink through his nostrils. In fact, Freyberg explains, the nose bone heals as undetectably as any other bone, provided that it is set properly. It’s just that when your emergency room is a corner of the canvas at Madison Square Garden and your cosmetic surgeon is Don King, you can’t expect the best results.
Nastier than a blow to the nose, a punch in the ear, a pop in the eye, and a fist in the stomach, combined, is that body trauma most feared among men: a knee in the, uh, external endocrine system. Give the average man a choice between getting hit in the groin or having a girder fall on his head, and watch him go looking for a construction site.
The most graphic case of this kind of injury I ever saw came during a game of summer camp softball when Sidney Katz (not his real name) was playing second base (not his real position) and was hit by a line drive in the antler (not his real appendage). Apart from having to spend that night sleeping with a strategically placed ice pack—something that caused the rest of us to make fun of him from the summer of 1968 until the middle of last week—Sidney displayed a level of unbridled agony I had seen before only in the closing reel of Fiend Without a Face when the monster is trying to suck Kim Parker’s brain and spinal column out through the back of her neck. Sidney’s anguish finally subsided after several days, and he spent the rest of the summer engaging in no athletic activity more strenuous than turning on the kiln in arts and crafts.
The nose has to detect subtle smells, and?for that it needs to be rich in nerves. That ?also makes it sensitive to pain, however.
How such a minor injury could cause such exquisite pain was long a mystery to me, and no doubt to Sidney. Some answers, however, were available from Irwin Leventhal, a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. What makes a hit in the groin so painful, Leventhal says, is the same thing that makes other sensations in that area so pleasurable: an enormously high number of sensory nerve endings. When an area of the body is innervated so generously, any sensation—whether good or bad—is going to be felt very acutely. What’s more, glands don’t have a whole lot of give, so if one is hit, it’s going to absorb the whole force of the blow. Finally, while all other glands are located deep within the body, male reproductive glands are outside, since sperm cannot be produced normally at temperatures above 96 degrees. Whatever additional protection they’d get by being tucked away is thus lost.
Making matters still worse is that pain in this particular area tends not to stay there but to radiate throughout the groin and up into the abdomen (and occasionally out to any other man standing within a 100-yard radius). This, Leventhal explains, is due to the phenomenon known as referred pain, which causes a sensation originating at one spot to travel along the nerve root to other parts of the body.
In this case, the nerves that cause the most discomfort are the perineal, which innervates the groin, and the pudendal, which runs from the spinal column to the groin and scrotal area. For anyone unlucky enough to have his pudendal and perineal nerves traumatically stimulated, Leventhal recommends ice for the first 24 hours to minimize swelling, heat for the next 24 to stimulate blood flow and hasten healing, and perhaps giving up softball for a pastime like quoits, or perhaps some online Quidditch.
For pain-phobes like myself, avoiding this kind of injury has always seemed like the better part of physical valor. After Sidney Katz, I made it a point never to play baseball again without the protection of a good athletic cup—as well as a saucer, salad plate, and place setting for six. After Ira Blitz, I made it a point never to engage in another school-yard quarrel without first getting in touch with Bono. And after the Mayflower, I made it a point to turn all models directly over to my brother—including any I might one day be lucky enough to date. I admit this strategy won’t ever earn me a heavyweight belt, but it won’t earn me any other kind of belt either, and that has always seemed like a pretty good trade-off.
