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Me excited for surgery - more
about this later |
Yes, you did read the title correctly. It's not actually as serious as it sounds,
but I'll explain more about what it is later. I kept this pretty much on the
DL, so very few people outside my family knew what was going on. Also, while
I'm thinking about it, let me give a disclaimer that I may or may not mention
some gross details later, though I'll try to keep it within an appropriate
spectrum. Amy always tells me I share
too much…
The story begins last November. And I could go into detail about this awful
week I had, but let's just skip to the point and say I got a severely abscessed
tooth (a first). Nobody could figure out how or why this tooth got infected,
but it did. I went to the dentist about
5 times in the space of a week, and my face swelled up horribly so I looked
like Quasimodo (not an exaggeration). I do actually have a picture of it (I
documented the whole experience, naturally), but it's not something the whole
world needs to see. Sometimes when I
want a good laugh, I pull up the picture just to look at it - I crack up every
time (Apparently, my sister uses it for the same thing so I'm glad I could
bring her joy as well).
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Not my Quasimodo picture but this
is when the swelling first started. |
But, back to the story. Because my face had swollen up so
badly, my dentist was a little concerned, so he sent me to an oral surgeon. The oral surgeon takes a pretty intense x-ray
of my mouth and says that my dentist did everything right and the crazy strong
antibiotics should eventually make the swelling go down. But then he starts
asking me if I have trouble breathing out the right side of my nose and proceeds
to tell me that it appears I have a large mass filling up my entire right nasal
cavity. He was guessing it was just
maybe a really large nasal polyp but told me I should probably get it checked
out.
So, then a couple of weeks later (once my face was back to a
normal size), I went to see an ENT. He stuck
a camera up my nose and showed me what it looked like. My first reaction was
that this mass looked like what I thought part of your brain would look
like. It looked kind of squishy and slimy
and purplish and okay, I'll stop with the description. However, even after
looking at it, he wasn't sure what it was, so he sent me down the hallway to
get a CAT scan (those things are crazy expensive by the way). When my doctor
came back from looking at the scan, he told me he wasn't sure it was a nasal
polyp and it actually kind of looked like it might be connected to my brain
just because of how high it extended. Unfortunately, the CAT scan wasn't detailed enough, so he sent me to get
a brain MRI.
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| Me in my stylish hospital gown |
At this point in life (about mid-December now), I start
being all dramatic and since I hadn't told anyone else around here, poor Amy
had to listen to me constantly talk about it. She kept trying to be reassuring by saying it's probably nothing - just
a nasal polyp or enflamed tissue or something else inconsequential while I'm over
here being like it's probably cancer and I'm going to die. Amy, I do apologize
for being overly dramatic, but at this point, it was actually a possibility. It
seems that the more research I did, the more convinced I became that it was a
tumor, so maybe it's not always a good idea to research your own medical
conditions…
In the meantime while I'm still having my freak out, I ended
up having the MRI (my first!) which in and of itself was uneventful. I got to
wear a super cool hospital gown and I was glad they only put me halfway into
the machine since sometimes I am prone to being claustrophobic. The machine
kind of sounded like I was being abducted by aliens and it took forever and a
day (really, it was just an hour), but it was fine. They ran a bunch of rounds of images and then
injected me with some contrast solution and then ran a bunch more.
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| My very official pre-op board |
The eventful part of the MRI was actually getting to the
appointment. It was at 8 am and of course, the one day I actually have to be
somewhere very early and on time is when my garage door decided to break (another
first). So I'm in the garage at 7:30 in the morning, trying to manually open it,
which was an impossible task. Amy hears
me downstairs grunting and comes to help, but to no avail. I'm on the verge of
a breakdown right now because I'm already a little frazzled by the whole
situation and now I'm stranded in my garage at 7:30 in the morning. But Amy is
excellent under stress and she thinks of our amazing and beautiful friend
Wallis who I promptly called and the timing ended up working out perfectly.
Wallis was just about to leave so she just picked me up on the way out and
dropped me off at the hospital. I was still frazzled and still not sure what to
tell people, so I don't think I even told her why she was taking me to the
hospital…
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| Just watching some tv before the surgery |
Anyway, a week later, I meet with the doctor again (it's the
end of December at this point - maybe a week before Christmas just to give you
some time frame) and turns out it isn't cancer. It's a nasal meningocele - yes, that's an actual thing. Extremely rare
though I was unable to find any real statistics about it. And I'll try to
explain it here briefly, but just know that I still don't fully understand it.
Basically, this mass in my nose was actual brain tissue that had leaked through
a small hole (probably a birth defect) in the membrane that is supposed to
surround and keep my brain in place. He
said the mass was about an inch in diameter and was probably full of spinal
fluid, which is not really something you want leaking.
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| Me in my really cute gown and shorts |
He then informed me that I needed to get surgery and
basically scared me into it by saying he would be hesitant to do any kind of
physical activity for the rest of his life if I didn't fix this. There's a chance that nothing would have
happened with it and I could have gone on my merry way and been fine. But,
there was no way of knowing how quickly this mass was filling up with spinal
fluid and growing so eventually it could have gotten dangerous for that reason.
And also, if the mass was somehow ever punctured or torn open or I got hit in
the face or anything like that, it could very realistically lead to meningitis,
which is often fatal. So, surgery it is.
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| All ready to go |
I got the surgery done in mid-January (my first surgery!)
and I think I probably should have been more nervous than I was. I was honestly
more excited to say I'd had surgery than anything because I'm weird and I was extremely
happy it wasn't anything more serious than it was. My wonderful mother came out for the surgery
and she was an angel. I don't know what I would have done without her because
the recovery was rough. I could barely
walk from my bed to the couch without feeling like I was going to fall
over. But I'm getting ahead of
myself. The morning of the surgery, we
went over and they gave me a really cute gown and shorts to wear and they stuck
an IV in me and then we just waited. Every time someone would come in they
would have to ask me my name and birthdate to verify who I was, which gets old
real quick. And they kept asking me to verify what surgery I was getting. The
name of my surgery was something like "endoscopic removal of meningocele
right side and repair of defect" so trying to spit that out every time was
a beast.
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| Sleeping right after the surgery |
Eventually they rolled me into a room where I met the
anesthesiologist and he explained to me what was going to happen - how he would
give me a little bit right now to relax me and then when I went into the
operating room, he would knock me out completely. After I was asleep, they
would stick an oxygen tube down my throat (gross) but they would remove it
again before I woke up a few hours later. After that conversation, I honestly remember very little. Whatever he
gave me at that time didn't knock me out, but it kind of felt like laughing gas
and I kept almost forgetting that I was conscious. They gave me a magazine to
look at while I waited and I think I just stared at the same page the whole
time. Eventually, some guy rolled me into the operating room, and I remember
them telling me to move myself over to the operating table, which I did and
everything after that is gone. I must
have been out so fast.
Next thing I remember, I'm waking up and I had an oxygen
mask over my face, but for some reason, when I started coming to, I thought I
was suffocating. I kept trying to pull the oxygen mask off my face because in
my loopy mind, that would help me get oxygen. Someone ended up coming over and asking me some questions which I don't
remember, but when I tried to respond, I became very aware that my throat was super
swollen and it felt like it was on fire. I literally couldn't get words out because
it hurt so badly - I kept trying to talk and all that would come out was some
weird grunt sound like I was a caveman. That must have been from the oxygen
tube being down my throat I'm guessing. Eventually
I somehow got the single word 'water' out in at least a semi-understandable
fashion and someone came over and starting spoon-feeding me ice chips.
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| Probably an hour or so after the surgery |
I think the original plan was to send me home in a couple of
hours, but I think I was not coming out of the anesthesia as well as they had
hoped and I was bleeding more than expected so I was there for a lot longer
than that. I had this thing that
basically held gauze underneath my nose like a mustache and I was soaking it
completely through with blood every 20 minutes. Eventually they did release me and they gave me lots of drugs - the
antibiotic was the biggest pill I've ever seen (my mom cut it half for me
because I'm a baby). And as a pleasant
surprise, Cosmo the Cougar happened to be leaving the hospital right as they
were wheeling me out. He held the door open for us and then as I got in the
car, he gave me a silent cheer in the usual Cosmo fashion. I used to have a
weird crush on Cosmo when I was a freshman (in my defense, he is a very
attractive mascot), and when I told Amy this happened, she thought I had
hallucinated the whole thing. Luckily my mother was able to back me up. He really
was there!
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Not cute but I needed a
good bleeding picture |
The first night was…rough. I think my poor mother slept even
less than I did and I'm not sure I slept more than an hour if that. She was constantly changing my gauze because
I was still bleeding through it at rapid pace and refilling my water because I
was guzzling it down (my throat still hurt so badly). Also, I should note that when I had left the
hospital, my stomach hurt a lot and it was crazy bloated. I had just assumed it
was because I had put so much liquid into my body between how much I had drank
and the fluids they were pumping me with. But I found out this first night that wasn't what it was. Turns out it was completely full of blood and
my body decided to throw it all up this first night. Apparently I had swallowed
a bunch during or after the procedure and it had all just been sitting in my
stomach this whole time, and I guess your stomach doesn't digest blood very
well (I warned you it might get gross). But yes, I threw up straight blood and
there was so much of it - no wonder my stomach hurt so badly. And my darling
mother would just send me straight back to bed every time while she cleaned it
up from everywhere. Luckily, that was
only an occurrence throughout the first night and something I'd rather not
experience again.
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| My mess of drugs and other medical supplies |
The next few days were uneventful. Still didn't sleep much
as I couldn't breathe and my face felt like I had gotten kicked by a horse but
other than that, I was pretty much fine. And then Saturday comes (the surgery
had been on Tuesday). By this point, the bleeding had finally stopped and I
spent my first night without gauze strapped under my nose. But almost the
second after I woke up on Saturday, I somehow triggered something and all of a
sudden, my nose was gushing blood again. Most of it was running down the back
of my throat and I was trying desperately to spit it out because I didn't want
another instance of throwing up blood later) but there was so much of it. I was
practically choking on it at times. I basically sat over the toilet and just let
the blood spill out. My bathroom was starting to look like a murder scene. And so here I was like this for literally 2
hours (and that's the correct use of literally by the way). And then on top of
this bleeding, I started to feel extremely light headed and dizzy. I could
hardly stand up and that's when I decided to go to the ER.
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| Just got to the ER |
We drive down there, but then right as we pull up, I can
tell the bleeding is starting to die down. Figures. After 2 1/2 hours, it stops
when we get to the ER. But at that point
we were there, so I went inside. The guy took some basic heart rate and blood
pressure tests and asked me if I was nervous because apparently my heart rate
was crazy high. And he also asked me if
I was normally this pale (granted I am a pale person but I think 3 people asked
me that while I was there). They took me
to a room and hooked me up to an IV and by now the bleeding had basically
stopped. The nurse pulled out a huge blood clot from my nose though it
definitely broke off and the other half was still way back in there. They took
some blood samples, and then they wanted to check my heart rate and blood
pressure while laying down, sitting up, and standing up. The standing up one
was difficult because by this point, I was so beyond dizzy. The guy doing the tests
basically had to hold me up.
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| More ER - I'm not super loving life at this moment. |
An ENT who was on call came and looked at me. It was a very unusual surgery and since this
doctor hadn't been involved, he was hesitant to really do anything too crazy.
There was a ton of packing and gauze up my nose to help control bleeding and he
didn't want to mess with that at all. So he looked up my nose and cleaned out
the blood. He stuck this suctioning thing in my throat and after several
attempts and me gagging like crazy, he finally pulled out this humongous blood
clot - I practically starting gagging again at the sight of it. The nurse
standing there goes 'how could you even breathe with that thing?'. So if nothing else, going to the ER was worth
getting that out because yeah, I couldn't really breathe.
Then my head nurse came back in and told me that the reason
I was on the verge of passing out and was so pale and my heart rate was at 170,
was because I was on the verge of being dangerously anemic. She said that prior to the surgery, my red
blood cell count had been 14 and now it was at a 9, so it had dropped by over a
third in 5 days. And from what I
understand (I could be making this up), they'll typically do blood transfusions
for levels below a 9. The way the nurse
was talking, they probably would have done one if I was still currently
bleeding but since I had stopped, they figured I was now stable. She told me to
start taking iron supplements to replenish all the blood I had lost and
eventually they sent me home.
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| Flowers from friends |
And since then I've been good. It took about 2 weeks before I could walk up
the stairs in my apartment without having to then lie down in bed for 5 minutes
just to catch my breath. It was pretty embarrassing but also not really my
fault. Doing pretty much anything would
leave me panting like a dog. Even now,
almost 5 weeks later, small things still make me crazy exhausted. My doctor did
finally give me the go ahead to start exercising a little bit and after 4 weeks,
he cleared out the packing in my nose so I can breathe normally again! Also, I
had been told prior to surgery that I would lose the sense of smell in the
right side of my nose but I didn't! My nose still feels like it's broken when I
touch it and I'm still apparently really swollen up near my brain, but he says
I'm healing well. Still not done with doctor's appointments, but I'm hoping the
next one will be my last.
