Woman's 'waterfall' runny nose was actually a brain leak

Kendra Jackson of Omaha, Neb., always had a box of Puffs tissues stuffed in her pocket "everywhere I went" because her nose never stopped running. Kendra Jackson of Omaha, Neb., always had a box of Puffs tissues stuffed in her pocket "everywhere I went" because her nose never stopped running. Photo: Antenna/Getty Images/fStop Photo: Antenna/Getty Images/fStop Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close Woman's 'waterfall' runny nose was actually a brain leak 1 / 23 Back to Gallery

At first, Kendra Jackson thought her runny nose was due to a cold or perhaps an allergy. Nothing that a little rest, a couple of aspirin and perhaps an antihistamine couldn't fix.

But medications didn't work. In addition to the sniffling, the Omaha, Neb., woman would cough and sneeze. Her head would throb constantly with pain. It was so bad, she couldn't sleep at night.

This went on for years.

A parade of doctors came to the same conclusion — it's just allergies. Meanwhile Jackson was going through a box of tissues daily to combat the flow.

"[It was] like a waterfall, continuously, and then it would run to the back of my throat," Jackson told KETV.

There was one clue to the medical mystery: Jackson's symptoms began a couple years after a 2013 car accident. Her car was violently rear-ended by another vehicle, the impact propelling her face into the dashboard.

Eventually she turned to Nebraska Medicine for help. A physician's assistant discovered that, as Nebraska Medicine later wrote emphatically on Facebook, cerebrospinal fluid "FROM HER BRAIN WAS LEAKING OUT OF HER NOSE!"

Nebraska Medicine rhinologist Dr. Christie Barnes and the Ear Nose and Throat team estimated Jackson was losing about a half-pint of cerebrospinal fluid per day through a small hole in her skull that drained to her nose.

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Fortunately, angled instruments made repairing the hole relatively easy. Jackson's own fatty tissue was used to plug the leak in an operation a few weeks ago.

Jackson is sleeping much better now and no longer has to blow her nose regularly. Doctors expect her to make a full recovery.