On Tuesday I went to see my otorhinolaryngologist (or Ear, Nose, and Throat doc) for basically a routine checkup. After all, it’s been five years.
I take relatively few medications (or at least that’s what the medical pros tell me) but two of them are for my upper respiratory tract. And I still have some annoying problems with said tract.
Previously when I saw the otorhinolaryngologist, the nurse would spray something up my nostrils to numb the nerves so that the doctor could send his probe up my nose to see what was going on, but according to her, ever since Covid, they now use a gel. She claimed that patients liked it better, found it less irritating.
So she stuck a stick with the gel up each nostril and told me to breathe deeply, which I did. She said it would sting a bit. As she was walking out the door, I said:
It stung a little but not for long.
I don’t think she caught the reference.
But she was right, the gel wasn’t as bad as the spray.
In due course, the doctor came in, and after some preliminaries, he stuck his probe up each nostril, recording the interior of each for posterity. And then he showed it to me, as I recorded it for the delight of the fans of this blog.
Did he say my voice box was slightly twisted? Maybe that’s what gives me a deeply resonant voice?
He made some suggestions, renewed my prescription, and recommended I get a CT scan of my sinuses.
And he put my mind to rest about something else. There is nothing to suggest that my sinus problems are caused by my gas range. The knock on gas ranges is that they tend to cause asthma in children, and there are no children in my house. (Though that doesn’t solve the problem of the gas pollutants.)
When I went to checkout, the woman at the counter was wearing a rainbow mask, which I complimented. After all, I’m not a Republican.
She said I could get the CT scan as early as Friday.
“Oh, that sounds good. I wasn’t expecting it so soon.”
“Wait,” she said. “You haven’t heard the times yet. Let’s see, there’s 7:15 in the morning and 2:45 in the afternoon.”
I thought about it for a moment and said: “The 7:15 sounds doable. That means I’d have to be there by 7:00, right?”
“Yes, and at that hour of the morning, since there’s no prep involved, you should be in and out in no time.”
“Fine, let’s do it!”
It wasn’t until I got home and checked the weather that I realized that on Friday we’re due for a cold snap. A very windy cold snap. I usually try to arrange things so that I can stay inside when the outside temperature falls below around 20° F.
Oh, well. If Rose could stay afloat on that wooden panel all night in the freezing Atlantic Ocean, I can brave a 15 minute walk to the hospital and back in the wind.
Of course, they tell me that Rose was a fictional character.