While I'm working on the post about my Alaska trip, here's what I've been doing for the past few days:

So for the last several years I've had a problem with breathing. No, that doesn't mean I'm a vampire. I can breathe; I just can't always breathe well. Like when I wake up in the morning, or go to bed at night, or walk around during the day, my nose is invariably stuffy. I carry kleenex with me everywhere. I've gone in and had myself checked for allergies, and they gave me a nasal spray, but that didn't seem to help much. Then I read about turbinate reduction (sometimes called somnoplasty.) According to the ear, nose, and throat doctor I went to see at Carle Clinic, chronic swelling of the turbinate glands, which warm and filter air through the nose, can cause blockage and difficulty breathing. The doc said that the turbinate reduction might work for me, but I also have a severely deviated septum (that's so going to be the name of my next band), so I might eventually have to have a septoplasty, which breaks and realigns the septum. Since the septoplasty is a procedure they perform under general anesthesia, and the friends I've talked to who have had it done say that recovery is pretty nasty, I decided to go for the simpler out-patient procedure of the turbinate reduction first. If this doesn't work I can always let people break things inside my nose later!

So my appointment was this Monday at 2:45. I arrived at the doctor's office a little nervous in spite of everything I'd read about the painlessness of somnoplasty. My very nice nurse, Kay, reassured me and walked me through each step as she did it. To start out with, she stuck a big gel pad that was connected to the electricity-generating machine to my back. "Just to ground you and make sure the electricity goes where we want it to." Great. Then she numbed the inside of my nose by squirting a lidocaine (or some other -caine) solution up in there. The part that ran down the back of my throat tasted god-awful. Kay left me with a few tissues and went to get the doctor to start the procedure. Because the doctor was with another patient, I ended up sitting there for 20 minutes, long enough for me to worry that the lidocaine was wearing off. So when the doctor did finally make it in to the room, he re-squirted me, and I got to taste that hideous taste again. Then he injected me about three times in each nostril with novocaine, which I mostly couldn't feel, and which would keep me from feeling the next part of the operation, which is the meat, as it were, of the procedure.

With my nose comfortably numb, he powered up the tiny metal wand and proceeded to stick it deep into my nasal cavity. He would announce the electrical current as it ramped up from 100 joules to 300. I didn't feel a thing, except for some slight tightness, like someone was turning a screw inside my head. He zapped about 3 places in each nostril, applied some stuff to help the pinpricks from the novocaine injections clot, and boom, we were done. The procedure itself took about 15 minutes, so I was only in the doctor's office about an hour, and that could have been halved if he hadn't taken so long to come in at the start. They gave me a box of scratchy hospital kleenex to take home so I could blot the teeny bit of a nosebleed I had. (From the injections. The electricity cauterizes the turbinates, so there's no bleeding from that.) I made my appointment to return for a follow-up in four weeks (the amount of time it usually takes for the procedure to show results), and then I walked the four blocks home.

By this point I was sneezing like a madman. (Unsurprising, I suppose. After all, the inside of my nose must have been very irritated by what had just happened to it.) I quickly realized that the regular kleenex I had at home weren't going to do the job, so it was off to the grocery store to buy some tissue with aloe and some saline spray to keep my nose moist. If I had to do it over again, the only thing I'd change is to plan better and have the tissue beforehand.

Recovery so far has proceeded as follows:
Day 1: Nose constantly felt like I was going to sneeze, and I often did. You know that tickle inside your nose that's almost an itch? I had that all the time. Couldn't breathe through either nostril. Spent the night sleeping propped up by pillows, breathing through my mouth, and waking up every few hours to blow my nose. Felt like the worst cold I've ever had.
Day 2: Still couldn't breathe through my nose, although I otherwise felt fine and the sneezing had stopped. Felt like recovering from the worst cold I've ever had.
Day 3: Mostly able to breathe through one nostril. Nose still drippy.
Day 4 (today): Breathing is a little clearer.

I'll let you know how it goes a few weeks from now when I should, fingers crossed, be breathing more easily than I have in years. Wouldn't that be nice?