Answers, maybe
Feb. 19th, 2015 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_lucy21This is what a normal sinus CT scan looks like.
This is a fair approximation of what my upper sinuses look like on a CT scan. It's like there's these islands with little tiny channels. As you can tell from the normal CT scan above, that is not what your upper sinuses are supposed to look like.
Also, these snakey, spiraly things are called turbinates. Mine are bigger than they should be, which causes drainage issues.
And so, in a few weeks (probably on March 10th), I will have surgery to fix those upper sinuses and reduce the turbinates and clean out some scar tissue from the prior surgery while they're at it. Will this solve the problem? There is a roughly 90% chance that it will solve whatever drainage issues are causing problems, which will likely solve some of my sinusitis issues and probably clear up the ear infection issues. There is about a 5% chance that there will be no improvement and a probably somewhat less than 5% chance that it will cause additional issues. The ENT was very up front about that, but he said he really was not trying to dissuade me from having surgery because he does feel that I would be in that 90% group- I had no problems after the first surgery and I had vast improvement for over a decade, so there's no reason to believe the same won't be true this time. He did say that I could keep going on with the rinses and we can keep surgery in the back pocket if the rinses were helping. Since they're really not and since I'm really rather tired of being in pain, I said, no, let's go with the surgery.
This may not completely solve the headache problem, but it's likely to help. I may still need to hunt down a headache specialist, but I'm obviously going to wait until after I recover from the surgery, since it's so close. It is going to be a somewhat rough couple of weeks to get to surgery, since I have to stop all pain meds other than tylenol and all non-prescription supplements as of Monday. And since I didn't expect that we were going to be like, "yup, surgery time" today, I have a lot that's going to need to happen at work before I can take two weeks off. I also need to talk to HR and see how they handle surgery and recovery time from a PTO standpoint.
But for the moment, it's bedtime.
This is a fair approximation of what my upper sinuses look like on a CT scan. It's like there's these islands with little tiny channels. As you can tell from the normal CT scan above, that is not what your upper sinuses are supposed to look like.
Also, these snakey, spiraly things are called turbinates. Mine are bigger than they should be, which causes drainage issues.
And so, in a few weeks (probably on March 10th), I will have surgery to fix those upper sinuses and reduce the turbinates and clean out some scar tissue from the prior surgery while they're at it. Will this solve the problem? There is a roughly 90% chance that it will solve whatever drainage issues are causing problems, which will likely solve some of my sinusitis issues and probably clear up the ear infection issues. There is about a 5% chance that there will be no improvement and a probably somewhat less than 5% chance that it will cause additional issues. The ENT was very up front about that, but he said he really was not trying to dissuade me from having surgery because he does feel that I would be in that 90% group- I had no problems after the first surgery and I had vast improvement for over a decade, so there's no reason to believe the same won't be true this time. He did say that I could keep going on with the rinses and we can keep surgery in the back pocket if the rinses were helping. Since they're really not and since I'm really rather tired of being in pain, I said, no, let's go with the surgery.
This may not completely solve the headache problem, but it's likely to help. I may still need to hunt down a headache specialist, but I'm obviously going to wait until after I recover from the surgery, since it's so close. It is going to be a somewhat rough couple of weeks to get to surgery, since I have to stop all pain meds other than tylenol and all non-prescription supplements as of Monday. And since I didn't expect that we were going to be like, "yup, surgery time" today, I have a lot that's going to need to happen at work before I can take two weeks off. I also need to talk to HR and see how they handle surgery and recovery time from a PTO standpoint.
But for the moment, it's bedtime.