Recovering from surgery
Those who follow me on Twitter or otherwise electronically know me may have been surprised/frightened by some messages relating to my having surgery. Last Tuesday, I went in for some surgery to hopefully allow me to breathe through my nose in a more useful way. I recently learned that I had a deviated septum that rendered my left nostril just about useless. Of course, I never noticed this my entire life...it never occurred to me that I wasn't using that nostril.
Doctors believe that this obstruction to my breathing, both while awake and especially while asleep, could be the root of some health problems I've been struggling with. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a fan of doctors and certainly have no love for hospitals, so when I agree to have surgery, it means that I have a strong belief that it's important to my health and well-being to do so.
I had the surgery, consisting of a septoplasty and turbinectomy, last Tuesday, January 27th at the inexplicably awesome Stanford University Hospital. The surgery went completely as expected with no complications and was performed by the awesome Dr. Li. There were a couple of hiccups, one before and one after: I had an allergic reaction to the hospital gown so they had to get me a different one, and I had a slight arrhythmia for a few hours after surgery.
I'm on the road to recovery now. My mom was nice enough to fly out and take care of me for the week because, as she says, "that's [her] job until you have a wife." And I was glad to have her. The recovery was a bit tougher than I thought it would be. It would have been tough for me to manage everything by myself (though worth noting, super friends Shelby and Courtland offered to step up if mom wasn't able to come up). The pain was a bit more widespread and longer-lasting than I thought it would be, so the hospital and Dr. Li adjusted my pain medication a couple of times.
So how are things now? Well, my face is still pretty swollen, though it's most noticeable on my nose and upper-lip. The swelling has gone down a great deal since Tuesday, when my entire face was swollen, though amazingly I didn't get a black eye. Right now I probably look like I was beaten up, left on the street for a week, and then picked up and cleaned up a bit (but not much). If you want to know what it feels like, picture the worst, stuffiest cold you've ever had, take that, and then imagine someone punching you square in the nose as hard as they can. That's about what it feels like.
The most maddening part of the healing process is that I'm not allowed to blow my nose. That means I just need to let my nose drip whatever it's dripping, and that's driving me insane because it's been dripping since Tuesday (though thankfully has slowed down). I'm still a bit out of it thanks to the pain meds and mostly feel too tired to do much. Today was the first day I felt well enough to sit in front of the computer and type.
You may have been wondering how my last blog post got published on the same day as my surgery. WordPress has a great feature that allows you to delay the publishing of a post until a specific date and time, and since I wanted to keep to my one-tech-article-a-week resolution, I wrote it the previous weekend and just set it to publish on that day. Pretty cool, huh?
So, I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm fine and on the way to getting better. I'm sure it'll be at least another week before I feel close to normal, and probably be another 2-3 weeks before I have my previous energy levels back. I'm going to try to do some work on Monday, but might have to work from home if my head is still foggy. I'm also relatively sure that there will be at least two sentences in this post with grammatical errors, so please forgive that asdf;jklasdfcsd. Kidding. Kind of.
