Nose News

My nose healed well, and within a week, I was breathing thru both nostrils. The healing process has been a bit odd, tho.

The doctor warned me last week that I'd have a runny nose and a lot of congestion, and he was right. He failed to mention that the scabs forming in my nose during the night would feel as tho I had somehow inhaled a Lego piece in my sleep. On a hunch, I decided to work some of these crusty things out, a process that was both captivating and painful. The resulting stalagtites were the sort of thing best enjoyed in privacy: no one in my family wanted to see the extracted item. It was yet another time in my life that I longed for an identical twin. ("Look what came out of my nose!" "Cool!") Later the doctor confirmed that scabs are like crystals in that they can grow unabated; I can only imagine how large these minerals could have been had I left them alone.

Weirder still was something that I succeeded in pulling out two days ago after many minutes of coaxing. This globular mass resembled nothing human. If you've seen The Matrix, you might recall the bug that Trinity removes from Neo's bellybutton; that's pretty much what I had, only mine was no longer glowing. I removed the mass from my nose and put it out of its misery with a swift blow to what I took to be its head. Suddenly I could breathe! Once again I didn't find any immediate interest from the wife and kids -- apparently they were content to use their imaginations. I had to console myself that at least the aliens would no longer be able to track me with the device they'd implanted in my head.

I saw the doctor again today. This visit ranked right up there on the list of the most pain I've experienced in a seated position. Initially everything went smoothly, as he calmly peered into my nostrils and pronounced them satisfactory. I mentioned my alien visitors and he nodded, acknowledging that these demonstrate that I had not fully healed. As a precaution, he peered and poked deeply into my sinus with a long thin tube that tripped nerves normally protected from such probing. He worked out a few small remnants of the earlier tracking device -- apparently I had missed some of its legs and part of its abdomen -- and then, to my relief, he removed a second implant that had been lodged even further down. The removal of this second locust allowed even smoother breathing, but it came at a cost. My face was hurting in places he hadn't even visited, like my eyeballs. Eventually the pain subsided, but so did my effortless breathing. Once again my nose is slightly stuffed. It seems that the implantation process can take place even when the mother ship is nowhere in sight.

I'll have to rely on my menthol cough drops for a few more days.

How My Nose Felt

This photo from Total Recall, with Arnold, illustrates how my nose felt when the doctor removed my dressing. The gauze, plus this inflatable plastic bladder, extended pretty deep into my schnozz, but when they came out, I felt a delicious sense of relief, similar, I'm sure, to what Arnold's character felt when he removed the Martian 'bug' from his honker in this sci-fi thriller from the 1980s.

Viated Septum

For as long as I remember, I've had a deviated septum. But today I had that surgically repaired. At long last, mine is once again a viated septum.

As tortured as that term sounds, that's as tortured as I felt when the anesthesia wore off. One would think that the worst pain was in my nose and generall sinus area, but one would be wrong. Instead, my throat was the source of agony. My nose merely ached a bit. My first thought as I came back to consciousness was, "I hope I've just had a dream about how bad I could feel if I go thru with this, because I'm going to tell them that I've changed my mind." Needless to say, it was too late.

My next thought was about that unfortunate pro football player who likely will never regain complete use of his limbs as a result of an accident a couple days ago. That guy must have been thru a lot more surgery than I'll ever endure. My third thought was that my wife survived thru 3 nasty deliveries, the last a planned C-section. Maybe I could toughen up a bit. My choices were: complain or refrain. I went with 'refrain.' It's not like I could have whined about my plight anyway, since I could barely speak.

Your throat hurts after nasal surgery for the specific and obvious-later reason that in order to operate on your nose, the doctor has to intubate you. 'Intubate' comes from the Latin "in-," meaning "in," and "tuba," meaning "feels like a tuba has been pushed." Actually my throat feels as tho I swallowed some sand paper and then threw it back up. And then swallowed it just once more. And the worst part of this whole experience is that, at least until my nose gets unpacked by the doctor tomorrow, I have to breathe thru my mouth, compounding the problem. Ice cream and icies help, as do cough drops, but only so far.

I was lucky enough to have a wonderful friend take me to and from the hospital. Diane is my kids' great-godmother, if there could be such a thing. Her title is somewhat odd since no one in my family has believed in a god for many generations, but if there were a god, then there could be saints, and Diane would qualify in my book. She made sure I got home okay and then explained the redressing of my bandages to Shirra. In case it wasn't already painfully obvious, I couldn't have driven myself home if not for the pain but also the pain meds. Shirra has been a saint since I got home, and the kids were great. Eventually my second batch of meds kicked in and I was ready for dinner, an online game of Scrabble, some TV, and this blogging. The pain is coming back, so I just took my codeine dose #3, and I'll have to hit the sheets soon.

So why is my formerly-deviant* septum fodder for my blog about unicycling? I only had this operation in order to have an easier time with my breathing during exercise, and my only exercise is unicycling. I race every summer at the annual unicycling Olympics, and I'm going to be riding over 120 miles in 5 days during a big race in 2008. I had begun to notice that it was possible for other people to nose-breathe during races but not for me. It was also impossible for me to sleep on my back, since I would probably attract the turkeys that always roam about our garden, but as I slept on my side since college, this was really not the issue. It really came down to unicycling.

I nearly started the 2nd sentence in that last paragraph with the word "Because." Clearly the codeine has taken effect. I'd better head to bed soon.

* Shirra's joke

1st Annual Yonkers Race

Today was a first for me: a unicycle race with a cash prize.

Organized by the friend of one of our club members, the race was meant to draw some needed attention to the beautified (and beautiful) downtown area of Yonkers. A guy named John contacted me to ask if I could summon as many unicyclists as possible to participate in the race. I was skeptical -- it's one thing to get people to meet at Grant's Tomb, but Yonkers is a bit out of the way, and the time (10 am) didn't help either. We managed to get there -- in my case, this involved an extra hour's drive to avoid the Tappan Zee bridge only to run into a delay at the GWB -- and by 11 am, the races were over, prizes distributed, and photos taken. Again I hit traffic getting home, but I did manage to get Emmett to his inaugural soccer game in time.

The race was meant to be similar in length to a 10K, about 6.2 miles. John measured the track and found it to be just over three-quarters of a mile. We decided to make the race 2 laps for kids (under-14s) and 6 laps for the rest of us. We ran the kids' race first in order to lessen the chances of a collision since the track was fairly narrow at points. Emmett did fine, winning $20 while riding for the first time on his new 20" uni -- I accompanied him thruout the ride -- and Fiona did well enough to come in 2nd of 5 girls, good for a $40 prize. Because the route wound thru a garden at one point and had a few other twists, my speedy guni was a poor match for the conditions, but I'm not sure I could have done as well as my brother -- he finished first by a wide marge. He and I discussed later how the kid in charge of the laps seems to have made a mistake that caused all of us to ride one less time around, so in the end it appears that my brother's winning time of 16 minutes was for a course a bit less than 4 miles long. He came away with a $50 cash prize and a $75 gift certif for a restaurant nearby.

I was happy that we got so many riders, mostly from our club...twenty in all. We all got medallions, courtesy of the organizer, and more than half of the participants (including all of the kids) got cash prizes from a fund of over $400. The day was gorgeous, too. The only thing I was disappointed by was the almost non-existent public turnout, including a lack of press coverage. Ah well...next time.