Nose Cauterization

December 2nd, 2008 kNuke Posted in ACL Surgery Adventure | 4 Comments »

I haven’t been able to workout at all for the past week and I won’t be able to workout till next week Tuesday.  Just when I was getting ready to ease back into normal workouts too.

Basically what happened was that my nose starting bleeding.  It bled for seven days straight before I went to see the ENT.  Apparently the blood vessels in the nose are hyper-sensitive and blood-rich, which makes it an easy area to bleed.

I’ve had my nose cauterized twice in the past so I wasn’t too thrilled to go to the ENT, but I figured I had to since it kept on bleeding everday.  Even after putting Vaseline in my nose, thinking it was cracking due to the weather, it still bled; that was the last straw.

Here’s where the story starts to suck…  I had to get my nose cauterized and packed.  I’ve never had my nose packed before.  Basically packed equates to someone shoving a finger length piece of gauze up your nose.  That hurt like a biatch!

With the packing, I wasn’t able to breathe in the morning through my nose.  Also, my nose ran constantly and I had a massive headache for the entire day!  Yes, that’s right, the ENTIRE day!  On top of this, my nose bled while I was sleeping.  You know why all of this happened?  Because the damn ENT forgot to tell me the below two steps before I left the office:

1. Take Sudafed and Afrin to reduce the headache and sinus pressure.
2. Sleep upright more than usual.

I had to call the ENT to get these two steps…  DAMN ENT!  After following the above two steps, I felt a lot better and I was able to move around.  Before that, I was virtually useless and in constant pain.

It’s been a little over a week so I finally got to take the packing out and breathe normally again.  Taking that packing out might have be the most painful short-term incident I’ve ever gone through!  The ENT pulled the packing out halfway and stopped.  All the crap from my nose starting streaming out.  Then she pulled the entire packing out, allowing the rest of the crap to stream out.  I get shivers just thinking about that packing coming out of my nose!

After that was done, I sat there for a while, happy to breathe, but scarred from the entire ordeal.  The ENT said my nose lining was still a little raw and needs a little more time to heal properly so I won’t be able to return to normal activities for another week.  I’ll gladly wait the week, because I don’t want to go through that packing ordeal again.  Hopefully when I go in next week, I’ll get the green light.  I’m just glad this whole thing is over with, it was a hell of a week…