FX: Wind in canyon

That’s what it FEELS like, anyway.  Doctor Jim Bob pulled the packing from my nose yesterday afternoon and suctioned out the remaining gunk, gave me a copy of the pathology report and sent me home.  He told me I can go back to work when I feel like, so I’m going tomorrow.  That’s a week off, and quite as much sick leave as I have any business using.

He said I made the OR rather lively while I was in last Wednesday, and threw everyone’s schedules out of whack.  (Sounds exactly like me, I think.)  Doctor Jim Bob told me that during this kind of cleanout procedure, the average patient loses fifty to sixty milliliters of blood.

Me?  I dropped 475 ml, or in round terms, a full pint.

It appears that my nasal tissues are just as vascular as all hell, and of course this wasn’t helped by all the old scar tissue from previous nose jobs sitting in there.  Doctor Jim Bob said it was a good thing that endoscopic technology, especially the suction, has advanced as much as it has, ’cos otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to see enough to take out what he was after for all the blood, and he would have had to give it up as a bad job.  Fortunately, technology IS much better than thirty years ago, when I had my first nose job, or even twenty years ago, when I had my last one, so he was able to finish successfully despite everything I could throw at him.

(It occurs to me that I’ve probably always been this vascular; as I mentioned, one common post-surgical event for me was to have to vomit a stomachful of blood that collected down there while I was on the table.  The much-improved suction and tools means that this time I didn’t have enough blood down there to leave me ill afterwards.  <marthastewart>And that’s a good thing!</marthastewart>)

The pathology report was pretty lurid as these things go; it involved terms like “mucoid debris,” “fungal hyphae,” and “focally abundant.”  The better bits said things like “no atypia or malignancy.”  I reduced it to something like English, and it said “you have lots of old scar tissue, overgrown polyp tissue, and a king-hell fungal invasion in there.  I haven’t identified the beastie for certain yet, but it looks like some sort of Aspergillus, the way it branches.  You don’t have cancer.  You may have a rare, somewhat intractable fungal problem; can’t tell for sure until some more cultures we’re doing come back, but I wouldn’t get excited, it’s highly unlikely.”

L said I was a lot less noisy bed partner last night—that’s no surprise, I have a lot less to snore with now!  I have a better airway than I’ve had any time these last three years, and that’s awfully nice too.  I still notice some blurred vision, which is a fairly common side effect of letting a doctor rummage in the front of my skull; probably it’ll go away again and if not, I’ll take up the matter with the ophthalmologist when I see him in June.

Store your gupas on a remanufactured Sharpie.  Fnord.