Archive for June 22nd, 2005

Devious Septum

Posted in Phoenix on 06/22/2005 06:35 pm by Sean

More news from the blazing hot land of Phoenix.

Driving home from work today one of the LED signs at the car dealership gave me a winning poker hand “111 degrees” Needless to say we have been spending a bit of time indoors.

I have a theory that people move to Phoenix just to have something to talk about, because you can always talk about the weather.

On to other things, for those of you who don’t know, I have been having serious sinus and allergy problems for over a year now. I can only sleep on my right side, and have made Kleenex corp. open a new division for Phoenix. Well after throwing medication (up to 5 differents types at a time) into my body, i went on tuesday to an ear-nose-throat doctor. It took him all of 10 minutes to come to a reasonable conclution with three options.

The conclusion was that I have some pretty good allergic reactions to the local trees and flowers, and that I have a pretty severe deviated septum that blocks about 90 percent of my right nostril.

Now with those two problems I have three solutions.
1. An in the office procedure to reduce the size of the turbinates (air filters inside your nose, they swell due to allergies), but he would only do it to the left side, and the right wouldn’t do me any good.
2. Since shots are cost ineffective, he uses a procedure of allergy drops that you put under your tongue, and gradually get you used to the allergins. Same idea as the shots, without the whole shot thing. Usually takes about 6 months at least to become effective.
3. Surgery- removal of the septum. may not totally cure my problem, because it may make the allergies worse, but I would have use of both nostrils.

So I have scheduled on July 8th to go in and have the surgery, we will see how I have after, and then possibly do the allergin drops after that.

This is a picture of what I should look like after the procedure:

No, seriously, the chances of anything going wrong are about 5%, this is a pretty common procedure.

I will be off work for approximately a week to heal up, and you can expect some pretty good painkiller induced ramblings at that time. Wish me luck!