I can’t smell any more

Over the last few months, my sense of smell has almost completely disappeared.  Things that I’d normally have no trouble detecting and appreciating (or avoiding, for that matter) . . . well, they just ain’t there.  I can only smell a very little bit if I snort very hard.

I think I know what’s going on.  I’ve been prone to nasal polyps ever since I was a teenager, and it feels like the ones on the left side of my nose have grown back to the point that they’re blocking the ethmoid sinuses, where most of the smell-sensitive nerves are located.  In fact, loss of sense of smell is one of the diagnostic symptoms for nasal polyps, as is persistent severe nasal congestion (which I have) and frequent sinus infections (which I also have).

There’s only one cure for polyps:  surgery.  I’ve had it done three times, in 1973, 1978, and 1984.  In that same period I’ve also had an ethmoidectomy (1974), where the doctor cut out big chunks of tissue from the ethmoid sinus, and two nasal resections (1974 and 1978), where he broke my nose on purpose and re-set it to correct deformity in the septum.  (L likes to joke that ever since the ethmoid tissue was removed, I really do have holes in my head.)  Five nose jobs in ten years’ time, and you could never tell it lookin’ at my nose from the outside.

The doctor who did all my previous nose work is now retired, so I’m going to an ENT who, besides being good at his job, is also the son-in-law of one of my mother’s best childhood friends.  (The Comanche Syndrome strikes again!)  I fully expect he’ll look up my nose and schedule me for surgery right away.  The procedure is not at all complicated; even twenty years ago they were doing it as a day surgery, but it does require general anesthesia.  Doctor Jim Bob has assured me that the state of the art has improved since my last time around, so maybe it’ll be even less complicated than I remember.

The main thing it is, is uncomfortable.  The surgeon has to pack your nose solid with surgical gauze to stop the bleeding, and even so the dressing weeps continually while the packing is in.  You go around day and night with a gauze pad surgical-taped underneath your nose to catch the oozing blood, and invariably the continual application and removal of the tape makes your cheek skin raw and angry.  I’ll have to spend a week looking like someone punched me, feeling like I have the worst head cold in the world, and I’ll snore like a grampus at night, what little sleep I’ll get, which ain’t much.  I’ll also be a mouth-breather and be half-suffocated all week.  And then comes the fun of the day the doctor pulls the packing out.  The first time Dr. Burns did it, he had to call in the biggest hospital orderly he could find to hold me down to the bed.  Nasal tissue is that sensitive, and it was that painful.  Subsequent times weren’t so horrible, but it’s still no fun at all as the packing pulls loose the week’s worth of scabbing.  I’ll have a royal nosebleed for ten or fifteen minutes before things finally slow down.

The thing I hope for most is that the surgery won’t damage my sense of smell again.  After the ethmoidectomy, the nerves were so damaged and so outraged that for years afterward nothing at all smelled as it used to do.  Foods that I’d always loved now tasted so nasty that I couldn’t stand to be near them.  (It’s only within the last five or six years that I could stand to drink a Dr Pepper again because its taste went so badly off.)  And if someone nearby wore Halston perfume, it felt like someone was jabbing needles up inside my nose.  Jim Bob and I are going to have a talk about nerves and smelling before he gets me on the table again.

But with all the discomfort, I can’t put off doing something any longer.  My left nostril is almost completely blocked, and the right one may not be all that much better.  I remember how bad I felt before my first surgery in 1973, when the left nostril had grown completely shut and the right was almost gone too.  I’m not going to have that kind of misery again.