Spare Change
I’m not a doctor. Nevertheless, I have a story to share. One time, a coworker came to work with a black eye that he said he had gotten after a fall while snowboarding that weekend. It looked bad, but he said he felt okay. Besides a mild headache, he said he felt no symptoms.
A couple of hours later, he asked me a peculiar question: “Why does it smell like pennies in here? “ I said, “Like a metallic smell? Like your hands after you handle a lot of change?” He said, “Yes, exactly!” I asked him if he had a nosebleed when he fell, to which he said yes.
I told him “I think blood may be seeping into your throat more than 24 hours after the accident. Go to the hospital right now!” He said he’d make an appointment for later that week with his family doctor. I said, “No, no, no. You need to go right now to the emergency room instead of going to lunch.” He went.
He had a suborbital fracture that was slowly bleeding into a sinus cavity, and the ER doc said the escape path for the blood was just about to swell shut, which would have quickly put a bunch of pressure on his left eyeball and probably permanently blinded him in that eye.
Later, he asked me how I knew what was going on. A few months before, I’d had four wisdom teeth pulled and the blood seeping down my throat smelled just like pennies. Story Credit: Reddit/severoon