I’m talking about my nose. I went to the Ear, Nose and Throat specialist today to see what we could do about my snoring. I’m told that it’s not unlike laying next to an entire camp of lumberjacks operating high powered chainsaws when I really get going and there’s been more than one occasion my poor wife has had to retreat to the living room couch where she can still hear me through closed doors. In other words, it’s a little on the loud side.
So I went, as I said, to see the Nose Doctor today to see if we could figure out what the hell my problem is. He opened with every Doctor’s favorite solution to every problem you’ll have this side of an icepick stuck in your eye socket: Lose some weight, fatass. OK, he said it a little more nicely than that, but I could tell he was thinking it. So then he did the tongue depresser trick where he sticks it just far enough in your throat to kinda trigger your gag reflex without actually sticking it far enough to actually make you retch and then he checked my ears to see if my brain was still where it was supposed to be and then he shoved what looked to me like bent needle-nose pliers into my nostrils to see how far he could stretch my nostril before I intentionally kicked him out of pain.
Turns out that at some point in my past I broke my nose. I have no idea when that might have been. Sure, I can remember knocking my schnoz with various objects over the years, never intentionally mind you, but I never thought I’d broken it. But he says I have and that’s part of my problem so he wants to perform surgery on my nose. Specifically he wants to perform a septoplasty which is a fancy way of saying he wants to forcibly straighten my broken nose. Here’s one brief summary of the operation:
- The basic principle in a septoplasty is to straighten the crooked portions of the septum. The operation is almost always done through the nose, without an external incision (there may be an incision if a rhinoplasty is also done at the same time). Badly deviated portions of the septum may be removed entirely, or they may be removed, readjusted, and reinserted into the nose.
Oh yeah, that sounds like fun.
Best of all it’s all done with a local anesthetic so I get to be awake and aware as he goes in, removes parts of my nose through my nostrils, shapes them into lovely and interesting new configurations and then shoves them back up inside my head. With my luck I’ll get a guy who used to carve ivory for a hobby and I’ll end up with a miniature “Wall of China” carved out of cartilage holding up my honker. I’m actually more concerned with the week off of work it’ll require and the fact that I’ll walk around with cotton gauze bunched up in my beak for a few days.
Can I just say that my confidence wasn’t boosted by having the Doc get interrupted in the middle of telling me what was involved because another patient who had been through this procedure was in to have her gauze removed and was bleeding profusely so they needed his assistance? Not to mention the resounding “OW! OW! OW!” that rang out during his absence followed by his muttering something that I’m assuming was supposed to be consoling to an obviously unhappy patient.
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to this.
But if it means I’m less of of an auditory experience for my wife when she’s trying to sleep then it’ll be worth it. Plus after we roto-root my nose we’re going to do a sleep study to see if I’m dumb enough to stop breathing while I’m sleeping. It just gets better and better, don’t it?
Yikes!!!