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*sighs*

Tape-face is what happens when you need to secure a gauzewad (sorry, “drip pad”) under your nose … with tape. Eventually, no matter how “gentle” the tape is, you will have peeled off most of the skin on your cheekbones. In about a day, really.

The pre-op nurse who had to start my IV kind of went at me like … hmm … what’s a good analogy?

A gorilla threading a needle?
A poorly-trained matador?

Ooh, wait, a poorly-trained gorilla starting an IV? (Barrett also has a choice description for the nurse, too, which shall not be published. Let’s just say … “you can’t say that on Television”, and the FCC would be leveling substantial fines if this were FM radio.)

It’s not really that she was so poorly trained… it’s just that I have small deep veins, and she was using a needle and cath that were way too big, so when she’d flush the line, she’d end up exploding the vein.

After she tried and failed three times, she called in another nurse, who used a smaller line. And that worked just fine.

So I only have three large bruises, and one small not-bruised IV puncture.

I tolerated the nurse effectively, I think. It was, after all, 7 AM, I’d only had six hours’ sleep, Barrett and I had argued the night before and we’d both been very upset, and I had taken a Lunesta. After that kind of night, the nurse is lucky I didn’t start asking her where she went to school. She did another thing that was irritating… She was flipping through my pre-op paperwork, reading stuff aloud to confirm that I am me, and I know what I’m having done, etc… just making sure they don’t saw off the wrong leg when I go in there for a bilateral ethmoidectomy. Then, without displaying any of the papers she was looking at, she said, “And this is your signature?”

HUH? Is WHAT my signature?

Thus begins the confusion. I’m like… “I don’t know IF I signed something if you don’t show me the paper.”
She says, “didn’t you sign the Consent to Treat form??”
I say, “I’m sure I did, but I can’t see what you’re looking at - it could be the Declaration of Independance for all I know.”
“Well honey,” she says oh-so-sarcastically, “I just READ it to you.”
“Well, NOOO, what you read to me was the name of the surgery, and you didn’t say what form it was on.”
“Well it was on the Consent to Treat form.”
“And every other form I signed.”
Barrett pipes up with “You really didn’t say what form it was, you only read the procedure name.”
“WEHHHL,” she huffs, “I didn’t know I had to be so SPECIFIC.”
“I’m a terrible literalist,” I said, “You have to be specific with me. And YES, that is my signature on that piece of paper which I can’t read from here.”

I have packing in the right side of my nose, which is irritating, and makes me feel constantly on the verge of sneezing. It comes out on Friday. My doc told Barrett that the right side had been particularly badly-behaved this time around. He’d had to do substantial revisions on the turbinates on the right side, as they were very swollen and closed up. The discharge papers also added the word “Septoplasty” to the procedures, which is nice. My septum was mostly corrected in my first surgery, but did need some further correction.

Anyway. My right eye doesn’t drain quite right because of the packing in my sinuses and the post-surgical swelling in my ethmoids on that side. So I’m bleeding from my nose and crying from one eye… It’s like, fucked-up Emo Elfi. The left side is pretty clear, I can almost breathe through my left side.

I take some Lortabs and sit still… and drink coffee. Love the coffee.

–Em