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Wow, did this thing knock me on my ass! I can't believe how much this operation laid me out. It has been two weeks since the "procedure" and I am finally getting back to some semblance of normal. It has only been in the last few days that I haven't needed a little nappy to get me through the day. I mean, I am not a person who naps easily, but my body just wasn't getting enough sleep. Or enough calories. And there were so many things that the doctor neglected to tell me about my recovery phase. Wow, am I really fragmented here. Let me try again.
As opposed to the aborted first attempt at this operation , I took the "no eating or drinking after midnight" rule as gospel. Last time I ate a normal dinner at around 6:30 and that was it. By the time the surgery was called off at 1:00 PM, I was miserable with hunger. This time I kept eating right up until midnight. It was great! I usually try to adhere to the old weight loss adage of "don't eat anything after 7:00 PM", so this was wonderful. I just kept grazing all night. I finished up my third bowl of Honeycombs at 12:02 AM. I was ready for that old surgery (HA!).
The next day went pretty smoothly. Claudine drove me in to the hospital. She was on call that day so she would have had to hang around the OR today anyway. As it turned out, she had to go across the street to the hospital's outpatient building to perform two surgeries just as I was being prepped to go back into the "pre"-holding(?) area. That kind of stunk because I had to take out my contacts and obviously couldn't wear my glasses. So I was sitting alone in this out of focus room for about 35 minutes. Finally they wheeled me into the actual OR and it was just like every cliche you've ever seen about surgery. Everyone had a mask on. I got wheeled under that big circular light. They stuck a mask on my face. Boom. Fade to black.
Waking up in the recovery room was filled with the same movie/TV cliches. Blurry. Disorientation. Barely discernable faces peering down at me with bemused smiles. It was vaguely embarrassing to be so helpless and vulnerable. I felt some hands clean me up - apparently I had all sorts of dried blood hanging out of my nose. I think Claudine was there at one point. But I faded back out really quickly
Later, I woke up and was in the ICU. I didn't really need to by in the ICU, but because of the sleep apnea, they wanted to keep a monitor on me to make sure that I was still breathing as I slept. Apparently, that's important or something. But let me make this completely clear: I was miserable. WTF is up with that? I thought this would be some quick procedure, I'd have a little discomfort and that would be it. I'd be back on my feet in no time. But the sad reality was that I didn't even want to move. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breath properly. They had the oxygen tube attached under my nose, just like the people at the old folks home. And they said that there were some type of pain killers in my IV drip. But they are dirty, double-dog liars, because there was no killing of any pain. At all. Later, Claudine came into the room and had them hook me up (literally) with a "patient-controlled-administration" thingy. Basically it looked like the thing the contestants on Jeopardy use to ring in to answer the question. When ever I felt like I needed more morphine, I clicked the little button on top of the unit and more morphine supposedly flowed into my IV. It had an internal control so that a patient couldn't click it over and over until they died. Which is a nice feature. I think it was a big scam because, as I said before, I didn't feel any killing of pain was going on. At all. No matter how many times I clicked.
Contrary to what I thought about an ICU, it is not a quiet or restful place. There are machines always beeping, nurses always taking your vital signs and other patients with there own problems. So those factors combined with great pain did not allow me to sleep longer than 2 hours at a time. Subsequently, January 29th became "The Night That Would Never End". Time stood still. Time might have even gone backwards for a couple of hours there. I had no watch, there was no clock around (not that I could see that far without my glasses or contacts) and, because of the whole anesthesia/morphine thing, my internal clock was also messed up. The fact that the ICU was kept as dim as a Vegas casino floor didn't help. So I floated in and out of un restful sleep all night.
I'd like to take this time out to say how much of a jerk I felt like for being miserable. There were two other patients in the ICU. A woman who was undergoing cancer treatments and a man who just had his prostate removed. The woman had apparently been there for a few days because I could here her talking on the phone and to the nurses about how sweet one of her husband friend's wife was to cook meals for her family while they visited her in the hospital. The man had his surgery the same day I had mine, but his family was also there and I could hear him talking to his family and the nurses. These people had problems. I just had a crooked septum and a little sleep apnea - a little snoring is all. And I was going home the next morning. Neither of them were going anywhere for a few days. Yet, I was miserable and these people didn't seem to be going through any of the pain that I was going through. So as bad as I felt physically, I felt even worse for being such a wuss. I thought I had a pretty good pain tolerance. And I do, but I think I have to rethink it a little. I have a low pain threshold for low-to-moderate pain. But if it goes into the moderated-to-high level, I am a simpering baby. (sniff). But I wish the best for those two where ever they are today.
Claudine came to seem me the next morning. She had actually been there all night, delivering two babies. She went home at 7:00 AM to get some sleep so she could pick me up later. Later Richard, one of Claudine's partners came in to see me. A very nice thing to do, but I was so not in the mood to see anyone. Then my doctor came into to check on me. Rich introduced himself to my doctor as "my gynecologist". Under any other circumstances, very funny. Anyway, my doctor came in and cleaned me up. I'd been oozing blood all night apparently. Hmmm, I hope Rich enjoyed talking to me, gazing at the crusted blood and snot on my upper lip! A breakfast tray was brought in. HA! The absolute last thing I wanted was to eat something. Yet I knew that I hadn't eaten anything solid in over 24 hours so I tried to eat the oatmeal and sip some apple juice. Oops, my doctor said, I need to tell you something. Because of all the work we did on your palate and uvula, you may have trouble eating and especially drinking. Drink only very, very small sips at a time or the fluid will back up into your nose. Saywaht? You know that feeling you have when you've been swimming and a little bit of water gets caught somewhere between your throat and the back of your nose? That's what I had to look forward to. For the next week to 10 days. Needless to say, I did not eat or drink anything else that morning.
Claudine comes back and drags me home. Then she has to go to work. The kids are home with their Nina (my M-I-L) and there are men working on the house. Wha? Oh, yeah, I seem to remember, we're having all these rooms refinished and painted. Well, at least I'm not able to smell that nasty freshly painted room smell. But still, when you feel like crap, and your nose is swollen on your face and there is a big bandage under your nostrils to catch dried blood clots, you'd like to be able to stagger through your house without running into strangers. Strangers that want to talk to you! Those next four or five days are a complete blur. That was due to a combination of Oxyfast and Tylenol #3. But even then, I couldn't sleep longer than 2 hours at a time. And I only ate jello and popsicles. I tried to drink some Gatorade just to get some fluids in my body, but damn, it really hurt to drink like that and since I could only take little sips, it didn't really seem worth the pain. I did discover a couple of interesting things though. I started analyzing the pain I was having in my mouth and throat. My tongue was really sore and swollen as if I'd been chewing on it while on Novocaine. I asked my doctor later and he told me that my tongue had to be in a retractor for about 45 minutes while they worked on my throat. Also, I started to feel some tickling in my throat. I realized one evening in complete horror that what I was feeling was the knotted ends of the sutures and stitches hanging down in the back of my throat. AAAAAUUUUGH! The last thing that I discovered was that I had two pieces of plastic up my nose - one on each side and stitched through my septum.
I went back to the doctor on Saturday so he could remove the stitches at the base of my nose. Now, I had not really thought about the actual mechanics about the operation, but the stitches at the base of my nose (right under my nostrils) made me wonder. I found out that they basically clipped the tip of my nose off my face and flipped it up onto the bridge of my nose. Nasty. With the tip peeled up, they were free to straighten the septum. When I discussed this later with Claudine, I found out she got more of a glimpse of this than she wanted to. While I was under the anaesthesia and on the table, Claudine came back from her two case across the street from the hospital. She walked into the OR I was in to see if I was still there. She thought that the anesthesiologist would be at the head of the table, but when she walked in there I was, her beloved husband, with my nose resting on my forehead. She said that was a little bit more of me than she ever wanted to see. They called her over to the table but she wasn't interested. She stood over by the door to ask her questions. Obviously, she's not squeamish about blood, but for some reason seeing me like that squicked her. I tell this story around her all the time now just to conjure up that mental picture in her head. I'm evil like that. The following Tuesday, I went back to the doctor so he could snip the rest of the stitches and pull those long pieces of plastic out of my nose.
Now, on to the positives. Positive #1: I DO NOT snore anymore. I mean, at all. Claudine used to worry about me because of all the gasping, rasping noises that I would make in the middle of the night. She used to pound on me to wake up enough to roll over. Eventually, she'd have to leave the room to get some sleep. Now, she's worried because I don't make any noise at all. She told me she had to actually put her hand on my chest to check my breathing because I wasn't making any noise. It's nice to wake up next to your wife in the morning instead of feeling guilty waking up alone because you drove her out of the room. Positive #2: I lost 18 pounds. Twelve days of eating jello and popsicles will do that to you. I'm under 200 pounds for the first time in a long time. I think even if I get back up to 1800-2000 calories a day, I can still just maintain this weight instead of going back up to 210. Besides, I should be able to run and bike much better now that I can actually breathe instead of gasping for air the way I used to. Positive #3: My nose is slightly less crooked. Since this wasn't really cosmetic surgery, they really weren't aiming for a perfect alignment. To do that, they would have flipped up the skin of my nose and broken the bones to be able to realign them. That is the procedure that causes the black eyes that sometimes accompany nose jobs. For me they just realigned the soft cartilage in the septum but that was enough to pull my honker slightly back to straight again. And really, it's been crooked for 20+ years, I'm married already, what the hell do I need a perfectly straight nose for anyway?. Claudine said it was a little strange to see me with it as straightened as it was. She said she's only known me with a crooked nose; it'll take a little time to get used to the straighter version. As the swelling goes down, I think it will start to swing back towards to being more crooked again. Eh, what can you do?
So I think I am back to somewhat normal. I still have a tiny sore throat and the tip of my nose is very hard to the touch. But all in all I think I will survive this. In spite of me being such a big wuss.
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