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Serious woman has a cold on white background

Every time you have a runny nose, you get reminded of just how annoying it is. It comes along with a cold or allergies and sometimes you wonder when it will end.

Kendra Jackson thought she was suffering from allergies when a nose constantly ran for two years, according to CBS News. Multiple doctors told her that it was nothing but allergies getting to her.

However, when your nose is so runny to the point that your shirt is drenched when you wake up in the morning that raises questions. On top of that Jackson suffered from severe headaches and had trouble sleeping at night.

“One of the things she said that stuck out to me was that she would wake up and her entire shirt would be covered with this drainage from her nose,” explained Carla Schneider a physician assistant at Nebraska Medicine. “That is not normal. That’s not allergies at all.”

It turned out that Jackson was suffering from something you could call brain drain. The technical term is Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Leak. A condition in which fluid that surrounds the brain leaks through a hole in the skull. Doctors discovered that she was losing half a liter a day!

“CSF helps to create a buffer for the brain so if the brain moves it doesn’t hit against something hard,” explained Schneider. Leaks like this in the brain could lead to deadly infections like meningitis.

These leaks according can happen spontaneously or can be caused by severe trauma due to a head injury, tumor or surgery. In 2013, Jackson got into a car accident and said she hit her face very hard on the dashboard. She says that’s around the same time she started to experience large amounts of drainage from her nose.

Once test showed that she did suffer from CSF, doctors scheduled her for surgery on April 23 to close the hole in her skull. On May 4, she had a follow-up appointment at the Nebraska Medicine center where doctors say her recovery is going well.

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(Source: CBS News)

(Photo Credit:ThinkStock Images)