He Follows His Nose

He Follows His Nose....It Always Knows......


Not again. Another nose blog.

Well, part of blogging is sharing experiences. I had an experience.


See, I have to use a CPAP machine to breathe at night because I have sleep apnea. The machine only lets you breathe through your nose, which is ok for most people. I, on the other hand, have a narrow nasal passage and.....(eerie music plays in the background)....inflamed turbinates.

That’s right. Inflamed turbinates. Yes, they were microwaved two years ago, and......THEY’RE BACK! Some guys have all the luck. I am the guy who got adult chicken pox after having them as a child (1-500,000 chance).

So, what’s a turbinate? You have six of them that sit between small bones deep in your nose. When you have bad allergies, they become inflamed and cut off your breathing passage. It sounds like you are stuffed up, but it is the turbinates blocking your air passages. I had to use nasal spray each night just to open my airways so I could breathe. Of course, Afrin is quite bad to pump into the schnoz, and the doc said (in layman’s terms) that I’m an idiot who’s going to Afrin my nose into oblivion, so I’ve got to have another turbinate reduction surgery.

Anyway, the ordeal starts with the six-inch needle that the doc pokes into my nose. He tells me to make a little hand signal when I feel the medicine run down the back of my throat. Yeah. Great. He says it is because he has to make sure the entire nose is numbed. Six times I signaled that the lidocaine was freely flowing down my throat.

After that comes the fun part. A needle gets inserted into one turbinate at a time. The needle is heated to 300 degrees. My turbinate is fried for 30 seconds and the machine then dings like a microwave. While my nose didn’t hurt, I got a huge sinus headache above my eyes. The doc said it’s like a reverse of the brain freeze you get with eating ice cream. This one is based on heat, not cold. Awesome. Overheated sinuses.

After my turbinates were duly fried, the doc confides to me that he has one more thing to do and, “this will probably hurt.” What that means from a Doctor is more like, “this will be more painful than any medieval torture device ever rigged up by the Spanish Inquisitors.” Well, it hurt.

The doc takes a device that is a cross between a letter opener and butter knife and informs me he is going to stick it through my nose into my nasal cavity and use it to break the bones between my turbinates. I let him........The worst part is that I let him do it to the other side even after I knew how the first side felt! No one should have a letter opener shoved three inches into his/her nose and then used to crack bones inside of your head! I’m sure it was actually a crime, but I haven’t had the time to verify that yet.

Funny thing is, the doc tells me that my breathing won’t get any better for the next four to five weeks because my broken bones will cause swelling which will prevent me breathing from my nose.

So, I sit here blogging with what feels like a herd of tiny little elephants rampaging through the insides of my head......with a stuffy nose......sigh.

Nasally Yours,

Blawgerman