Doctors in Saudi Arabia had already found pockets of air inside a 45-year-old woman's skull and a 2-millimeter gap in the bone beneath her brain. They told her to avoid straining. Over the next six weeks, she still held back sneezes on two occasions at social gatherings.
That detail, recorded in a case report in the American Journal of Case Reports published in April, helps explain an unusual choice her surgeons made. When they finally operated to seal the leak, they did not stop at the hole in her skull base. They also straightened the wall between her nostrils and shrank swollen tissue inside her nose, in part to lower the pressure a future blocked sneeze could build.
