Bryan Burningham has lost his nose more times than he can remember.
The first was fifteen years ago today when his dad’s rifle accidentally fired in his face. The bullet blew off his nose and blasted through his jaw, tongue and eye sockets.
The 13-year-old from Utah wasn’t expected to live.
“Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I was pretty messed up,” says Burningham, 28, and an actuary in Denver.
After a year recovering in a hospital and at home, he spent his teens attending school sporadically between surgeries.
Without a nose, the space between his eyes and mouth healed flat and empty in a wound he says didn’t bother him as much as it made everyone else wince. Like the little cousin who would cry at the sight of him. And the kids in the grocery aisles who would run away in horror.
“I knew I needed something to blend into a crowd,” he says, having spent the past 15 years growing into a man whose disfigurement is merely an asterisk to those who know him.
Burningham’s first prosthetic was a stiff silicone number molded from his sister’s nose. Like riding a girl’s bike, it was a bad fit.
It first snapped off in public during a high school assembly when students got to wear giant sumo suits and challenge teachers to wrestling matches. Burningham had picked his mom, who taught at the school.
He remembers knocking her down, then “jumping as high as I could, going horizontal in the air and body slamming her. The impact caused my nose to go bouncing across the floor while the whole gym fell dead silent.”
“You can’t get up by yourself in those sumo suits so someone had to hand me my nose,” he continued. “I put it back on. They helped me up. And I jumped on my mom one more time for good measure.”
Next came a series of prosthetic replacements, including the dud that fastened with a magnet rather than a snap. One fell off on an amusement park water slide, causing an embarrassing 30-minute shut-down while he searched for it.
Then there was the date he was one at age 16 when he dived off a bridge into a river and landed on a small piece of wood that sent his nose adrift. The girl dived in after it valiantly, but unsuccessfully. He ran home, smeared silicone onto an old nose and stuck it on his face.
“The date went on, even though my eyes were burning and I reeked from solvents,” he says. “Go figure, there wasn’t a second date after that.”
Burningham’s many noses have flown off during many racquetball games. He has devised a way to tether them to his face with green dental floss, then reel them in from snow drifts when he face plants on his snowboard.
In August came his latest model, his 10th nose — an exquisitely sculpted piece of art that perfectly matches his flesh tone. He likes to show off how, when he pinches his new nostrils, they slowly reopen as if they were real.
No matter how genius his prosthetics, Burningham concedes that some things are best done noseless. Like skydiving. And surfing. And kissing his wife, Natalie.
Any day now she expects to give birth to their first child, a baby girl they’ll name Pearl.
It’s an unlikely choice given that, with no movement in his top lip, he can’t pronounce hard consonants, including “p.”
But as names go, Pearl is especially apt. For having survived 15 years and 65 surgeries after what he calls his “immortality day,” Burningham understands better than most that the loveliest joys can come after the roughest experiences.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
