Under the knife

I have a date with a scalpel tomorrow morning about nine.

For the last couple of years the polyps in my nose have been growing back, and finally got to the point of blocking one side almost completely, leading to almost continual sinus infections.  Thank you, I had quite enough of THAT when I was a kid and I don’t care to go back to it.  I consulted Doctor Jim Bob and he tried me on a VERY experimental, non-FDA-approved off-label medication regimen he’d learned about at a medical conference, which can sometimes produce almost magical improvements, even to the point of making polyps go away completely.  The treatment involves taking high doses of itraconazole (Sporanox), an anti-fungal drug.  My insurance company just LOVED this, because even though there is a generic substitute, the generic still costs $250 a month or more, and they could only charge me a $5 co-pay per refill under my insurance plan because it WAS a generic.  They retaliated by refusing to let me fill more than a week’s worth at a time, forcing me to pay $20 per month in co-pays rather than $5 and go to the extra bother of going to the pharmacy every week.  Finally, they wrote me a letter two months ago to tell me that after May first, they would require Doctor Jim Bob to obtain prior authorization and approval for every single refill.  (You’d think I was costing ’em money or something.)

The itraconazole certainly helped and shrank the polyps some, but it didn’t make them go away completely, and as I also have some old scar tissue inside from previous nasal surgery (I had five nose jobs across a period of ten years in the Seventies and Eighties), we decided to say “the hell with it” and get out the knives.  I put off scheduling a table time until our tax refund came in, so we’d have about enough cash to pay deductibles and co-payments, which look to be $2,000 or so all told.

Doctor Jim Bob’s current plan is to cut out the polyps, remove the ethmoid sinus tissue (after which I WILL have holes in my head, thank you!), and enlarge the openings of the other six sinuses to improve drainage.  Better tools and imaging technology have made the procedure far less complicated than it was thirty years ago when I first had it done to me.  Barring something TOTALLY unexpected happening, I’ll be back home tomorrow afternoon, and at home I’ll stay for the next several days.  Doctor Jim Bob will have to pack my nose with gauze, and leave it all in place for several days while the tissue begins to heal.  The feeling is rather like having the Worst Hed Code Ebbar, and I’m sure I will snore like a grampus because of it.  Can’t be helped.  However, based on past form I also expect that I won’t need many painkillers, and will quickly be bored and ready to hear from the world, so beginning about Friday, phone calls or chats will be welcomed.  Just be aware that if you DO phone, I AM going to sound as though I have The Worst Hed Code Ebbar.  Don’t let it freak you out; I’ll tell you if I’m not up to talking right then, but I’ll be surprised if that happens.  Our home phone number is (five one two) four five three zero seven three zero, and we’re even so retro that we’re listed in the phone book!

Lavender hair cream reinvigorates the Pleistocene lemur dispenser.  Fnord.