Recovery, Day 4

Modesty prevents me from detailing my most significant milestone today.  Let’s just say my connection to the Cook County Water & Sewage Treatment department has been restored.  While this was undeniable evidence of my progressing recovery, it is possible that I may have over-estimated my recuperation slightly.  Today, my fourth day of hanging out, I decided to try and be productive—nothing overly ambitious, just mounting a screen door.  The good news is, we have a perfectly mounted screen door now.  The bad news—I am utterly exhausted and my somewhat clear nasal passages have swollen and become an impassable pocket of goo once again. 

Well, lesson learned.  There’s a reason the doc told me to limit physical activity and it wasn’t because he thought I was too skinny and needed to curl up with a bag of potato chips on the couch for 7 days to plump up.

In other news, sleeping is still a bit of a challenge.  Although mouth breathing is a pastime enjoyed by lower order species and my old high school football team that used to pick on me, it does not lend itself to falling asleep.  The funny thing is that I can tell my body REALLY wants to breathe through my new nose.  In fact, usually within a few minutes of dosing off I’m awakened by the uncomfortable vibration of air being pulled across the stents still affixed to various parts of my inner face.  Unfortunately, this will be the situation until next Tuesday when they’re removed.    Until then, I’ll sleep as my face allows and keep the home improvement projects to a minimum.  

Under the Knife... Which is Actually a Drill

Let's play a game.  See if you can guess what the items pictured at the left are.  Leftover props from the filming of Saw VII, The Excavation! No.  Q-tips for Robots... Wrong again.  Things a trained professional jammed into my face intermittently between 7 and 9 am last Monday????  Bingo.  

Even to the most stoic among us, SURGERY is a daunting proposition.  Your mind automatically wanders to the  worst possible outcome--Blindness, spinal fluid infection, higher marginal tax rates, another season of Chuck...   You can drift into some truly dark places.  However, with a little education and some preparation, you can keep your thoughts positive AND forget Chuck ever happened.  Oh, and having a decent doctor helps. 

In preparation for the pending hollowing-out of my face, I read a lot blogs, talked to my doctor quite a bit,  and was amazed by how many I know personally who have had the surgery.  It seems to be a about as common as having your tonsils out (which I haven't).  Of the people I know personally, none regretted the procedure and none complained too badly about the recovery.  On the other hand, in the blogger world, it seems like the only people that bothered to document their experience had the worst recoveries.  Well, not this Blog.  

Of course I don't remember any of the surgery--they use general anesthesia and a breathing tube to keep you blissfully oblivious to what is being done in the depths of your skull.  Pre-surgery was a snap with the one hiccup being that they kept handing me forms to sign with someone else's name on them.  Glenn Davis, where ever you are, I hope you got what you wanted.  

Next thing I knew I was in recovery and two hours later I was on my couch.

I have to say, at day two I feel pretty good.  Even Day one was not so bad--at least nothing a couple pills of Narco couldn't handle. I've slept well and even got a few solids down.  At this point (early Day Two) the pain is very manageable, drainage is minimal and I should have plenty of leftover Narco to sell the local neighborhood kids.  My throat is still sore from the breathing tube and I get tired very quickly and, without going into too much detail, my digestive functions do not appear to be all systems go yet.  Other than that, I can't complain.

I won't really know how I'm breathing until next week when the doc removes the stents buried somewhere up my nose and vacuums out all the post-surgical crud.  But I'm very hopeful.  For anybody thinking of doing this, I already highly recommend it.  Even if my breathing is only 30% better, it will have been worth it especially if it reduces my tendency to get sick.  Not to mention I get those cool mustache dressings and a whole heap of undeserved  sympathy.  Speaking of which, I'm going to go swallow some sympathy in pill form and try to sleep.

ciao