It’s Surgery Day! Sinus Surgery No. 9

I couldn’t properly convey all of the emotions I’ve had in the last few days regarding my pending sinus surgery. This is my first surgery as a married man, making it a whole new ballgame. I’m quite frankly freaking out a bit… sometimes more than a bit. This is one of my longer pieces at almost 1,000 words, just because it’s partially a brain dump and partially to get some good old-fashioned discussion going about some good and some rather unpleasant thoughts. Skip to the last heading if you want to avoid anything deep, meaningful, or sad. Otherwise, read on to get to know me more than you already do.

Skip to the next section if you don’t want to think about grim things

Let’s just get it out of the way: worst case scenario = death. Crap, guys! That would suck… but then again it would also be great. As the main provider and the one responsible for my household, I’d be a failure if I died now. We are doing fine financially and gaining ground to where we need to be, but if my understanding of estate law is correct Beautiful would have to spend almost all of the life insurance money to pay off “my half” of the mortgage in order to keep it.

However, as an evangelical, death itself does not scare me. I’ve welcomed it a few times in my life during the actual suffering parts of CF: blockages and the one time I was on oxygen and truly having a hard time breathing. Who wouldn’t want to stop suffering and have a new, perfect body in paradise? My eternity is secure, so my only concern is those I would leave behind; Beautiful being far, far, far and away my primary. She’s not only my best friend, but my teammate, cohort, confidant, advisor, counselor, nurse, and lover. We’ve had to discuss death, disability, and transplantation far too many times for people our age. It’s one of the rare things I just want to shout out “It’s not fair!” from the mountaintops.

Almost as bad: coma or disability

“Wait, don’t you already have a disability?” Horse pucky! I am not a “CF sufferer” nor someone with a disability. I have difficulties with certain things and there are a larger number of jobs that I can’t get compared to someone without CF, but I am far from disabled. Like I said in my last article, I would have to be disabled far beyond normal considerations of what being truly disabled is for me to not work any longer. Some people go on permanent disability when they hit 35% or so in the lung function basis, but I can’t stand for that for myself. I couldn’t do that in good conscience. So long as I can think and convey my thoughts and/or knowledge to others, we will always have an income, even if someone/something else has to get that information out to others for me.

A coma (even medically-induced) would probably be the most financially devastating situation because I am ineligible for long-term disability insurance through my (or any) healthcare plan because it’s seen as a given that I will eventually become disabled. Little do they know me, though. I’m certain that Beautiful wouldn’t be able to work if I’m a veggie for a while and we’d obviously be out the money I produce because I still haven’t produced an income stream that makes that sort of money hands-free (guilt trip). That is pretty high up on my list of priorities as soon as I have both the break in my work flow and the business savings to allow that sort of product development to occur.

Some details about the operation itself

As tempted as I am to go on a rant about the hospital stay so far, I’ll stick with details about what is going on with me instead of to me. For now. I had my first sinus surgery when I was still a lad playing little league baseball. I even had to delay it because I got chicken pox right before I was going to go in. My second surgery wasn’t too many years later, and it involved breaking my nose because I’d broken it myself in the pool that summer. He put plastic splits on both sides of my septum and stitched it clean through. Wow, what an experience. It was my most painful surgery.

Basically, what Dr. Seper is going to do is suck out any infection I have anywhere in my sinuses (even my frontal sinuses in my forehead), open up passages, and remove anything that became tissue in my sinuses that is supposed to be open air. She wasn’t sure from the CT scans if she will have to break my nose or not just yet, or if she will be using packing to avoid the dreaded scar band that has plagued my left side since my last surgery, preventing access to that entire side for maintenance procedures for the last 6 years.

My favorite part of this article

A few more surgeries later, all in Florida under one ENT’s care, it was beginning to seem like it was going to be a regular occurrence since my last two had been 9 months apart. The last one was now 6 years ago when Beautiful and I had only been dating a couple of months. She was also around for the one before that, but she was “just a friend” at the time, but she sure was smart, funny, interested in everything I had to say, and BEAUTIFUL! I remember like it was yesterday… she walked into recovery wearing a purple shirt and her hair in a ponytail. I was still hooked up to monitors and my mom laughed when my pulse quickened (quite a bit) when I saw my future wife. I’ll never forget that.

I can’t wait to see her in recovery again.