{"id":308,"date":"2009-04-12T03:20:09","date_gmt":"2009-04-12T07:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/?p=308"},"modified":"2009-04-12T03:20:09","modified_gmt":"2009-04-12T07:20:09","slug":"d-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/2009\/04\/12\/d-day-1\/","title":{"rendered":"D-DAY +1"},"content":{"rendered":"

For what my body has been thru in the past 24 hours, I\u2019m most surprised at how bounce-back I have been.\u00a0 I have these dueling urges.\u00a0 On one hand: to carry on, walk around, be vertical.\u00a0 Which begets the opposing urge to give into the physical chimes to lie the fuck down and just repair.\u00a0 To that end, I\u2019ve got a mother and wife making sure I\u2019m not up for more then a few minutes.\u00a0 And a stack of Netflix.<\/p>\n

My pain level, to use the standard hospital rating, is an unbelievable 2 or 3.\u00a0 No need to take any more of that crooked fucking Vicodin; just Tylenol.\u00a0 I had prepared for pain levels double this.\u00a0 So to only be grappling with a sinus pressure, a familiar discomfort, is a pleasant surprise.<\/p>\n

Today is also the day I get the tampons taken out.\u00a0 The packings, which undoubtedly are a significant factor in the pressure I\u2019m feeling up there, were placed an unknown distance up my sinuses, leaving these heavy black strings trailing out my nose and taped to my cheeks.\u00a0 I look like some feral cat whose picked & lost a fight.\u00a0 It will be good to get back into Dr Rust.\u00a0 Just to check-in, ask some questions, get some oral history of how the surgery went.\u00a0 Unfortunately, save for those few groggy moments when I woke from anesthesia, I haven\u2019t seen Dr Rust since.<\/p>\n

Sitting in the same brightly lit examination room I was in when Dr Rust first explained the myriad of best & worst case scenarios, I\u2019m aware for the first time since that the deed is done.\u00a0 I\u2019m on the other side.\u00a0 Sitting there alive.\u00a0 Post-op & pain free.\u00a0 Surreal.\u00a0 In the room with my mom, and she & Dr Rust are chatting about HER deviated septum, when he pulls out his spreader forceps and offers to take a gander up my moms nose.\u00a0 More surreal.\u00a0 And kinda funny, cause my mom obliges.\u00a0 So there we both were, Dr Rust and I, peering up my moms nose.<\/p>\n

Dr Rust explains that he\u2019s going to pull out the packings, and that I am going to bleed.\u00a0 A lot.\u00a0 For me not to worry.\u00a0 That he\u2019s done \u201coh\u2026 only a few hundred of these.\u201d\u00a0 When I ask where the tampons are up there, he informs me that they\u2019re packed into the ethmoid sinuses, the honeycombed shaped cavities between the eyes.\u00a0 Hoe.\u00a0 Lee.\u00a0 Shit.\u00a0 We\u2019re talking a lot further up there then I thought.<\/p>\n

But first, he soaks some cotton balls in a solution not unlike the Vicks nasal mist: where it contracts the mucus membranes and opens everything up.\u00a0 Stuffing a soaking-wet full-sized cotton ball up each nostril is again, not too painful: just terribly uncomfortable.\u00a0 That weird line between sinus-tickle and sinus-pressure, each producing a physical reaction resembling pain.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s the residual anesthesia, or a general numbness of the whole area, I\u2019m just relieved that I can\u2019t feel pain up there.\u00a0 Like so many things in Life, this has been NOTHING like the warnings people gave me prior.<\/p>\n

About 5-7 minutes later, Dr Rust comes back in, and places one of those pink kidney-shaped plastic dishes in my hand and positions it under my chin.\u00a0 Here we go.<\/p>\n

The next few minutes of my life will be ones that I will neither forget nor ever be able to accurately recount.\u00a0 If my mom wasn\u2019t there to witness it, I don\u2019t think I would have ever believed it possible.\u00a0 And she only SAW it.\u00a0 She couldn\u2019t HEAR what I heard.<\/p>\n

First, he tilts my head back, spreads my nostrils with the forceps, and needle-noses the cotton-balls out.\u00a0 One.\u00a0 Two.\u00a0 Each a mix of red & black, slapping into the dish followed an involuntary drip of tears from my eyes.<\/p>\n

Next, he precedes to finger-nail the surgical tape from my cheeks, to free the cat whiskers attached to the tampons.\u00a0 No fear.\u00a0 No apprehension.\u00a0 No worries.\u00a0 In hindsight, I suppose I should have been concerned.\u00a0 I mean, if you know a dentist is about to do something such as this, your body goes into reaction mode, to prepare for an onslaught of negative feelings.\u00a0 But with this, none.\u00a0 Perhaps because we all kept talking, a bit about the colour of the cotton balls, a bit about just general stuff.\u00a0 I can\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n

But I knew I was in for a ride when with one hand he twisted-up & knuckled the strings, and with the other, he squarely palmed my forehead.\u00a0 As if for leverage.\u00a0 Inside of 2 or 3 short seconds, the tampons, which looked like halves of french toast sticks, were out.<\/p>\n

There was no one-two-three.\u00a0 There was no advance direction.\u00a0 There was only the pull. \u00a0And that fucking sound.\u00a0 Like eggshells cracking.\u00a0 A lot of eggshells.\u00a0 My head pivots at the neck in response to the resistance.\u00a0 My vision goes all funny in that moment.\u00a0 With one action later, my head is downward, over the kidney-shaped tray that I am still holding.\u00a0 Thank god I didn\u2019t close my eyes for any of this.\u00a0 For close on the heels of the tampons, out both nostrils and my mouth, comes an unholy stream of blood.\u00a0 Mostly bright red (fresh) blood.\u00a0 But also some bits the same consistency & colour as charred steak.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The tears are pouring out of both eyes, so I hand my glasses over to my mom without looking.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want them to fall into the tray, the bottom of which is now completely filled.\u00a0 For a long & solid 15 seconds, both nostrils flow uninterrupted.\u00a0 Then for another 20, they drip with the cadence of a drum roll.\u00a0 Then for the next 5 minutes at least, they drip with a slow taper.\u00a0 Eventually, the right nostril stopped altogether.\u00a0 But left nostril never stopped dripping, even well into the night.<\/p>\n

I have never seen so much blood come out of my body at one time.\u00a0 My mom remembers that it was all she could do to fight back the urge to react as if I was hemorrhaging; that this routine post-op procedure had gone terribly sideways for her son.\u00a0 But we were BOTH re-assured by Dr Rust\u2019s warnings of blood, as well as his relaxed reaction to the blood.\u00a0 The force with which he had to pull, the crunching sound, and all this blood: As hard as this all was to reconcile, it was normal.<\/p>\n

I have ALWAYS had a penchant for gore.\u00a0 I was that kid in 8th\/9th grade who had Freddie Kruger and pages from Fangoria up on my walls.\u00a0 I was one of those early adopters who frequented Rotten.com long before they went paid-only.\u00a0 Same with Ogrish.\u00a0 I was fascinated with how the human body reacted to trauma.\u00a0 What we looked like.\u00a0 How our limbs & internal organs looked rendered free from our bodies.\u00a0 I know it sounds macabre, but I didn\u2019t so much enjoy these images & videos as I gained strength from them.\u00a0 Almost as if I was able to feel alive by these graphic reminders of how close accidental death is at all times.<\/p>\n

So to be staring down into this dish filled with a half-inch of blood spanning no less then 4 shades of red, and the black & white mottled tampons coagulating within, I was fascinated.\u00a0 Only a small fraction of the people I know would share such sentiments.\u00a0 Even regarding their own discharges.\u00a0 You know who you are.<\/p>\n

Following the tapering of the dripping, Dr Rust went back up there with a dentist-like vacuum to clear away some of the debris that had either coagulated or otherwise failed to drip.\u00a0 Again, tickle.\u00a0 No pain.\u00a0 Another moustache dressing and a few handshakes later, and I was slowly shuffling with my mom back out to the car.\u00a0 Whether it was the loss of that half-pint of blood, the physical debt of the actual tampon removal, or just too long being vertical, I was spent.\u00a0 I nearly fell asleep in the car ride home.\u00a0 With messy dressings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t really remember much about the rest of the day.\u00a0 In retrospect, a lot of the post-op days have blended into each other.\u00a0 I know I took 3x Tylenol and had another bowl of soup.\u00a0 And sleeping.\u00a0 A lot of sleeping.\u00a0\u00a0 With visions of french toast sticks on strings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For what my body has been thru in the past 24 hours, I\u2019m most surprised at how bounce-back I have been.\u00a0 I have these dueling urges.\u00a0 On one hand: to carry on, walk around, be vertical.\u00a0 Which begets the opposing urge to give into the physical chimes to lie the fuck down and just repair.\u00a0 … Continue reading D-DAY +1<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[9,133,146,154,169,171,177],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.archibaldjude.com\/spew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}