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Most people have a strategy they deploy when they have to sneeze, but if you’re one of the ones who try to hold them in, you might want to think twice about that approach based on the fairly terrifying fate that befell a man in the United Kingdom.
Sneezing is one of those annoying quirks that come with being alive, as it’s your body’s way of clearing out its system when it detects something it interprets as an irritant.
No one wants to be the person who finds themself ripping off a string of sneezes when other people are around, and while you can deploy a tissue or tuck your face into your elbow out of common courtesy, most people will beg for the whole thing to be over by the time the second “God bless you” is uttered.
According to Gizmodo, a 30-something guy in the United Kingdom who’s spent a good chunk of his life dealing with hay fever decided it would be a good idea to try to suppress a sneeze by pinching his nose and closing his mouth when one reared its ugly head.
However, that air has to go somewhere, and according to a research paper that chronicled the fallout, it ended up in his throat and caused a “spontaneous tracheal perforation”—which is a fancy medical way of saying he managed to rupture his windpipe.
After dealing with a swollen neck, the man in question headed to the hospital before doctors detected the hole in his throat. As the authors of the paper note, those injuries almost exclusively stem from physical trauma to the point where they believe this is the first reported tracheal perforation that was caused by a sneeze gone wrong.
I’ve always been paranoid about blowing out my eardrums when I pinch my nose while sneezing, so I’m glad I now have something else to worry about.