Well as of last night it had been 10 days since the nose surgery and things were going well. The pain was reduced to just that numb feeling you get when you inadvertently try and open a door with your nose or get punched right square in the schnozz. Both of which suck, but you know it’s going to get better and does not require any medical attention. So my nose was still swollen and will be for a month, but on the mend, looking nice and straight, and the crusty flow of dried blood and crud was starting to diminish with each daily Q-tip swabbing of peroxide. My only complaint was the stitches left behind. When I went in a week after the surgery for the follow-up appointment I was told that they would slowly dissolve over time, and to just ignore them.
That is much easier said then done. There is like a mile of stitching up in there and as it decays and comes loose in your nose it tickles and is constantly making me sneeze. Not to mention the smell. As the stitching thread that looks like fishing monofilament decays, it is coated with dried blood and slime and it just reeks. It kind of smells like a very old damp washcloth that has been sitting in the bottom of a mop bucket for a few weeks. With every inhale I can smell it and it’s hard to ignore.
So as you can imagine, with both the tickling and the smell there is a huge urge to pick at this stuff and try to ‘help’ it the f*ck out of my nose. All week little pieces ranging from a millimeter to a centimeter long have been showing themselves within reach, and despite warnings not to from my doctor I have been yanking them out. Well last night I was going to bed and I felt the damn tickling and looked in the mirror and sure enough there was a thread hanging in there. So I gave it a little tug and it came loose, but in doing so it pulled another long thread out. One end was hanging about a centimeter out of my nose, and who knows how far up the other end was.
I gave it a little tug…nothing. So I closed my eyes and gave a huge tug. OUCH!! It didn’t come free, but my eyes stung with tears, blood started pouring out of my nose, and I must have yanked a nerve because it hurt from way in the back of my nose all the way down through the roof of my mouth to my front top teeth. Goddammit! First I stuffed a bunch of tissue up there and eventually got the blood to stop. Then I took a scissors and cut the part of the thread off that I could see hanging out. Then I took some acetaphetamine and tried to go to sleep, but the pain was intense.
I was worried that I had done some permanent damage or ruined the surgery, so I called this morning and made an emergency appointment. When I got there I told the doctor what I had done and he just shook his head, chuckled, and said he was sure that I didn’t do anything serious but he would take a look. He poked around, removed a bunch of dried blood and more stitching, gave me another prescription of vicodin for the pain (my two front teeth are still numb), and told me there was no real damage done but to not do that again. Lesson learned: no matter what you do, do not yank at stuff hanging out of your nose that a doctor put there because I guess it’s there for a reason.
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