How I Managed to Break My Nose in College (Without Being in a Fight)

It was the night of Friday, October 30, 1992, and we didn’t have a party going on at the fraternity that night. So, I got a handful of brothers and the pledge class and headed to the Cellar, a beer bar at the University of Maryland that was the easiest to get into for underage students.

The bar was pretty dead when we got there, and we took turns buying pitchers and dancing. After an hour or so, more people started filtering in, and the dance floor got increasingly more crowded.

I was a few beers in and feeling good when a fist came out of nowhere and smashed me square on the nose. I never saw it coming. This guy who threw the sucker punch never said a word to me.

All I knew was that it hurt like hell and I couldn’t see anything for a few seconds. Then, I realized blood was gushing out of my nose. This guy broke my damn nose. My shirt was covered in blood, and I pinched it to try and stop the blood flow.

Some guys who were with me helped me back to the Pi Kappa Alpha house. It was just around the corner, but my painful face made it hard to navigate. As we walked through the front door, my brother, Mike, and a couple of other guys were there, and he asked what had happened.

I told Mike how a bunch of us were just drinking and dancing at the Cellar, and a random guy threw a sucker punch at me. He told me to go up, change out of my bloody shirt, and come back down.

When I returned to the front door, Mike and Rob, a fraternity brother who played on the University of Maryland hockey team, told me to go with them back to the Cellar. When we got back inside, they asked me to point out who punched me. He was outside the bathrooms with three or four of his brothers, and I let Mike and Rob know.

The next thing I knew, Mike and Rob were throwing hands at all of those guys, and within like 30 seconds, they’d dropped each and every one. I felt better, but still wanted to go back to my room and chill.

Before I could do that, one of the guys in our house said I should go to the hospital and get it looked at. I hopped in his car, and we were off to the emergency room, where we spent the next many hours waiting to be seen.

When I finally got to go back and have a doctor look at me, they spent just a few minutes cleaning me up, putting tape across my face, and said I should ice it often and sleep with my head elevated.

When I got back to my room, I crashed hard until lunchtime. My face looked rough in the mirror. This white piece of tape was holding my nose in place, and everything around it was red, except for under my eyes, both of which were on the way to being black eyes.

We had a Halloween party scheduled that night, and one good thing to come out of all of this was that I figured out my costume… a prizefighter. All I needed was a robe, so that was cool.

That Saturday also happened to be the day I was going to meet my girlfriend’s father for the first time. We made plans for lunch, and I hadn’t mentioned anything to her before meeting up, so she was surprised and concerned when I rolled up with a bashed-in nose.

I was worried her dad would think I was some knucklehead who got into fights regularly, so I apologized when I met him and told him the story. He just laughed and said he was in the Air Force and saw many broken noses from nights at the bar.

The next couple of weeks were very uncomfortable. I couldn’t blow my nose, and when I slept, if my nose even brushed against my pillow, it would make my eyes water from the pain.

But I am a glass half full guy, and I did realize a benefit from this punk surprising me with his cowardly fist. Before the punch, my nose was slightly crooked. After I got punched and then healed, my nose was more or less straight. I’d gotten a free rhinoplasty, so there was a benefit at the end.

Thanks for having my back, Mike and Rob.

Originally published at https://shawncollins512.substack.com.

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