Well, the strictly medical part of my adventures has come to an end. Mostly. The highlights of the days after my laxatives overload (tentative working title: Mad Lax: Beyond Thunderbowl) are as follows:
Increasing alertness, desire to open my window blinds and see what time of day it must be
Ability to recognize simple shapes and colors improving
Appetite demanding more than soup and that weakass yoplait with the blue lid
moderate increase in a desire to communicate with the outside world
not sleeping for 2 days, sleeping loads for the subsequent 2
Facial mobility increasing-- can wrinkle nose, communicate some human emotion
Okay, that brings us to yesterday...drove meself to the polyclinic to get me stents and splints out. I had dared to youtube the procedure, because according to my Dad, who got this procedure done back in the late 1400s, it felt like "getting kicked in the nuts and punched in the nose at the same time, but the punch hits a nerve in the center of your brain also". A wonderful description if there ever was. The youtube vids looked relatively painless, thanks to new technologies and plastics making removal easier (quick aside-- the stents are essentially these 2-inch plastic greenbean-shaped things that they jam halfway up your nose and into the sinus cavity to reinforce the structure of your nose whilst it heals), but the youtube people were also both fat and with little pug noses that seemed more accomodating than my neo-viking schnoz.
I'd expected the nurse to be there to aid and offer some kind of moral support, but the doctor went straight at it, pulling the nose cast off (sort of painful but not that bad, then snipping the stitches holding the stents in place. He then sprayed my nostrils down with an aenesthetic liquid. This was a pretty good idea in principle, but the excessive amount of the spray he used caused a healthy dose of it to trickle down to my lips, completely numbing them within seconds. Thus, all of his "help me help you" questions like "does this hurt?" or "can you feel this moving inside your frontal lobe?" were useless, because I could only slurp out "mblbrbl gdblbmffle". Once he figured that one out, we switched to international thumbs up-thumbs down.
It wasn't as painful as Dad advertised, but getting something that size pulled out of your sinuses is a very weird experience. Probably a cross between getting experimented on by aliens and what I'd imagine a prostate exam feels like. But for your nose. Definitely for your nose. Anyway, these big ol' dang ol' things came out and all was well. My nose is still swollen on the outside (yesterday I looked rather like my profile picture) and I'll have to ease back into phy
sical exertion, but the good news is that I can, for the first time I can remember, I can draw a straight, full breath through my nose. It's actually pretty awesome and I hate all you out there for being born with this supernatural ability. For my first real meal with my new sense of smell (and taste), I had Paseo's Roast Cubano with extra grilled onions. For those of you outside of Seattle, Paseo's sort of evens out Cuba's karma. On one hand, you do have to think about tortured political prisoners and assassinations, but on the other, you get a grilled baguette with a pork loin seasoned by Lucifer himself with spinach, some sauce I'll go to hell for eating, and grilled onions that you would freely trade your own human baby away to taste. Life is looking good.
Alrighty well there ends the account for my adventures in modern medicine/daytime TV. If the world sees fit to crap on me in an inspiring way--and it always, inevitably, does-- I'll write that down poste-haste.
Bananarama!
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