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.