Broken Nose: What to Do, and When

Most broken noses I see happen the same few ways: contact sports (rugby, football, boxing), a fall, a cycling accident, a car door, a toddler's head. However it happened, there is no blood test or scan that settles the question in the first hours. A broken nose is a clinical diagnosis: it rests on what happened and what I find when I examine you. The symptoms of a broken nose include:

• A crack you heard or felt at the moment of impact
• A nosebleed at the time of injury: the lining tears when the bones shift
• The nose looks different: bent to one side, or a new dip or step along the bridge you can feel with a fingertip
• Blocked breathing on one or both sides that was not there before the injury
• Swelling and bruising around the eyes, usually worst on days two and three

Broken nose symptoms peak around days two and three and then settle; what is left at day five tells the truth about the shape.

One point surprises most patients: plain X-rays are close to useless for a suspected broken nose. They miss real fractures, they show old ones, and the result rarely changes what I do. That is why guidance for emergency departments does not recommend routine X-rays for simple nasal injuries. The examination that matters happens once the swelling has settled, about five to seven days after the injury, when the true shape of the nose can be seen and felt.

Most nasal injuries can wait a few days for specialist review. A small number need medical attention the same day. Go to A&E, the emergency department of any hospital, if any of the following applies:

• A soft, grape-like swelling inside one or both nostrils. This may be a septal haematoma: a blood clot collecting under the lining of the septum. Untreated, it can destroy the cartilage within days and collapse the bridge of the nose. It needs draining urgently. If you check one thing after a nasal injury, check this: look inside the nostrils with a torch.
• Bleeding that will not stop after 20 minutes of firm pressure: lean forward and pinch the soft part of the nose; if it is still bleeding after that, it needs looking at
• Clear, watery fluid dripping from the nose, particularly one-sided: rare, but it can signal a leak of the fluid around the brain and must be assessed
• Double vision, reduced vision, or numbness of the cheek: signs the injury may involve the eye socket or the face beyond the nose
• You were knocked out, or you take blood thinners

None of these? Then first aid is simple: an ice pack wrapped in a cloth helps reduce the swelling, simple painkillers cover the pain (paracetamol rather than aspirin), sleep with your head raised, and avoid sport. If you are not sure whether anything on the list above applies, NHS 111 can help you decide the same day. Then get the nose assessed within the week, for the reason below.

Whether a broken nose needs treatment at all comes down to two things: the shape and the breathing. If both are normal once the swelling settles, no treatment is needed. If the nose is displaced, it can usually be straightened without an operation: the nasal bones are gently pressed back into position, a procedure called closed reduction or manipulation. It takes minutes. The catch is that the nasal bones begin to knit within two to three weeks of the injury. Once they have set in the wrong position, no amount of manipulation will move them, and straightening your nose then means surgery.

In practice the sequence looks like this:

• Days 0 to 5: too swollen to judge the shape accurately. First aid, and rule out the red flags above.
• Days 5 to 7: swelling has settled enough to see whether the nose is actually crooked. This is the ideal assessment point.
• Days 7 to 14: the window to straighten your nose by manipulation, under local or brief general anaesthetic, before the bones fix in place.
• Days 14 to 21: less predictable. The bones are knitting, and whether they will still move is something I judge at examination rather than assume either way. Worth asking about rather than writing off.
• Beyond about three weeks: the fracture has set. Straightening the nose now means formal surgery, and that surgery is best done months later, once the tissues have fully healed.

This is where the NHS pathway can let you down. If you saw a doctor straight after the injury and were told to wait for the swelling to settle, that advice was right. The trap is what happens next: emergency departments are good at excluding the dangerous injuries, and your GP can refer you on, but the follow-up clinic where manipulation happens must fall inside that window. If your appointment lands at week four, the opportunity has passed. When patients come to me privately with a recent injury, the point of seeing them quickly is to catch this window while it is still open.

Do not blow your nose. That is the one to be strict about: the lining inside is torn, and forcing air through it restarts the bleeding, while a fracture that runs into the wall of a sinus can let blowing push air out under the skin of the face. Dab rather than blow for the first two weeks, and if you have to sneeze, sneeze with your mouth open so the pressure escapes that way.

Two other things catch people out. Heat and alcohol both open up the blood vessels in the lining, so a hot bath or a drink in the first few days makes a fresh bleed more likely. And spectacles rest on precisely the part of the nose that is broken: if you cannot manage without them, prop or tape them clear of the bridge, or wear contact lenses until the tenderness has gone.

Missing the window is common. People assume the swelling will sort itself out, or the clinic appointment arrives too late, or the break happened years ago playing rugby and has bothered them ever since. The result is a post-traumatic deformity: a bend, or a twist that pulls the whole tip off centre.

The problem with a nose that healed crooked is rarely only cosmetic. The septum, the wall between the nostrils, is almost always deviated by the same injury, which is why a once-broken nose so often whistles or blocks at night. And the fix at this stage is established surgery with good outcomes: septorhinoplasty, which straightens the septum and the external nose in one operation. Because the obstruction is functional, the septal part of the operation may attract private insurance cover, and I document the clinical findings insurers need.

The timing rule reverses here: rather than rushing, I wait at least three to six months from the injury so that scar tissue settles and the true shape is stable before operating. An old fracture from decades ago needs no waiting at all; it can be assessed at any time.

Children's noses are mostly cartilage, which bends rather than breaks, so true fractures are less common than the number of playground collisions would suggest. When a child's nose is injured, though, the window for any manipulation is shorter, because young bones knit faster. A missed septal injury also carries a cost an adult never faces: it can affect how the nose grows for years afterwards. My threshold for examining an injured child's nose promptly is therefore low, and the septal haematoma check described above applies doubly. Formal reshaping surgery, if a childhood injury leaves a deformity, is generally deferred until the nose has finished growing, usually around age 16 to 17.