The night the nosebleed started, Zina Martinez, seven months pregnant with her second child, was sitting in the living room of her Las Vegas home, eating a bowl of ice cream.
Martinez, 22, was used to nosebleeds. She’d had them nearly every day since she was 10, an annoying occurrence doctors repeatedly dismissed as insignificant — a probable result of the bone-dry desert air.
When Martinez pinched her nose closed to stop what was usually little more than a trickle, blood gushed out of her mouth. Her husband took her to a nearby emergency room where a doctor cauterized a vein inside her nostril, which stopped the bleeding.