Man, I feel terrible for you @BeepBeepamJeep. I'm sorry that happened to you.
Do you play StarCraft Brood War by any chance? Played a couple of times with a guy who had a very similar name in the recent past.
My story is nowhere near as brutal as yours, but when I was 14 I was getting better at gymnastics, pretty much gymceling/looksmaxing without realizing it at the time (had to cut my long hair to do various gymnastics stuff, stopped wearing baggy-ass band shirts because I wore them to gymnastics and they would interfere, etc.). Now, some of the idiots that go to this gym do shit that makes no sense. You're usually learning from someone in a small group and are contained to your area, but then they also let some of the more "advanced" people have "free" time to go and use whatever portions of the gym they want to practice their routines and such, meaning they can mess with the equipment. At least that's what I think happened.
Anyway, I run and do a front flip onto a thick mat resting in a slightly recessed pit. Didn't check for any obstacles or hazards because fuck, it's a landing mat, it's on the ground where it belongs, and the floor around it is clear, no one is going to step onto the landing mat anytime soon (and generally shouldn't, anyway). I do my flip, I don't stick it all the way because it's my first one of the day and I'm not amazing at them yet anyway, so I land with knees bent maybe 15-30 degrees off vertical and my upper body posture is poor as well. I don't know what the fuck happens next, but my knees shoot up to my face faster than I can even blink and hit me square in the nose. Turns out some moron put a springboard under the mat, so when I hit it with my whole body weight, the springs compressed then expanded with almost equal force, and because my form was poor it popped my legs up but not the rest of my body. I fall backwards, thankfully on the padded floor, but the impact has me dizzy as fuck. My whole face is numb, I feel no pain, I felt like I was in a dream. I touch my face and it is soaking wet. "That's odd," I think as I look at my hands and see that they are dripping wet with blood.
I don't remember what happens next very clearly after that but basically I end up in the bathroom with my shirt off and bloody in the corner and I see my reflection in the mirror and my nose is just leaking like a faucet and everything has bloody hand prints on it. I see my nose and it literally looks like a lightning bolt, with the top half of it more or less in place and the bottom half of it off to the side at least half an inch, almost perfectly horizontally displaced. I touch it and I feel a sharp pain. I freak the fuck out, and almost impulsively try to straighten it out. I grab it between my thumb and index finger joint and just jerk it towards the center of my face and then black the fuck out.
Don't know how long I was out for or what happened exactly, but I wake up in the ambulance. Coach later tells me that they found me in a pool of blood in the bathroom and freaked the fuck out. I get to the hospital and by then it's all pretty much over; not bleeding anymore or anything, but I have a severe concussion now and was fortunate not to have gotten second impact syndrome from when I blacked out and hit my head on the bathroom floor/wall/sink (blood was everywhere so no way to determine). They keep me for a few days of testing and I go home with a mask on.
I did get two surgeries, one to straighten it because it was so crooked that it was impeding air flow, and one to shave and straighten the septum half a year later. Some of the most fucked up post-op procedures each time, such as sticking a Q-tip in its entire length into your nose, into your sinuses, which had holes burned into them and tubes stuff into those holes to keep your septum straight. Whole thing healed poorly and my nose is crooked to this day, but not nearly as bad as it could have been I guess. Still noticeable and there is no way to disguise it because I have a large Roman-style nose.
I wouldn't say that my face prior to this was anything spectacular, but looking back on some photos I took shortly before, I see a lot more harmony. Nowadays, having a diagonal honker fucked me up pretty bad. Your nose and ears never stop growing, apparently, and every year my nose seems to get a little more bulbous and crooked. Just FML.
