Closing the book on this HBWT experience has taken a lot longer than I thought it would. With all the hoopla around school and exams, I haven’t exactly been prolific as a blogger lately. However, here’s one tidbit: After nearly eight months, two dozen doctor visits, and scores of nose bleeds, my physician here in […]
Closing the book on this HBWT experience has taken a lot longer than I thought it would. With all the hoopla around school and exams, I haven’t exactly been prolific as a blogger lately. However, here’s one tidbit: After nearly eight months, two dozen doctor visits, and scores of nose bleeds, my physician here in Chicago finally decided to pursue surgery to fix the breathing irregularities caused by my broken nose. That’s right: rhinoplasty, a nose job. Now, a layman might think that this was a sort of obvious, inevitable conclusion, seeing as a) I smashed my nose into roughly 500 crooked little pieces this summer and b) all of the symptoms of difficulty breathing, bloody noses, and, ahem, mucus irregularities, all began almost immediately after that shattering. However, the American medical community likes to take its time, and not jump to any radical conclusions, like “maybe the devastating nose crushing this fool suffered has caused of all this weird, disgusting stuff to happen to his, you know, nose.” Before doing so, they needed to run myriad tests on me, including a cat scan of my head, x-rays of my chest, and a blood draw to rule out what the doctor called “longshot, odd-ball kind of stuff.”
“What kind of odd-ball stuff?” I asked.
“Well, tuberculosis, for one. Tay-Sachs disease. Syphilis.”
“Syph? Hey-O!”
I was almost disappointed when they all came back negative. Well, not really, but had it come back positive, at least I could have gotten t-shirts printed up that said “I PLAYED BASEBALL IN FRANCE FOR SEVEN MONTHS AND ALL I GOT OUT OF IT WAS THIS T-SHIRT… AND SYPHILIS.”
Anyway, surgery should be scheduled sometime over the next few weeks, and I’ll hopefully get to wear a brace that makes me look like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.
