Just in case anyone caught my mention in my obnoxiously long post a couple days ago about my unexplained swollen nose, I thought perhaps an illustration might help….

I’m thankful that today it seems to be subsiding. But still, I have no clue what happened to it that it would have swollen like that. Weird. A question for the ages, I guess.

In a related piece of my history, I had my nose broken in high school. Imagine a freshman Jerry Varner, skinny as a stick and under the normal intimidation of being a freshman in high school. Tommy Reid was one of our basketball team’s star players and we were in the same gym class. It was the section of the semester where we learned basketball, and in a gym class game, I foolishly agreed to play zone defense, only seconds after learning what zone defense was. So, Tommy Reid enters my zone, jumps for a rebound, and true to Tommy Reid form, came down with the ball with elbows flailing. One of the elbows came around and landed squarely on the bridge of my nose. For the next few days, I wore a metal “I” on my face to hold my newly reset nose in place. My almost immediate and unwelcomed nickname? Robo-Nose.

For the record, Tommy Reid felt really bad about it and was really nice to me.