Not Right in the Head

After an extensive examination, the doctor concluded that my wife wasn’t right in the head.

Aside: my wife is glaring at me with a look that could blister the paint on a battleship. In the interest of avoiding incineration, let me provide a some context.

The doctor in question is my wife’s oh-toe-lair-in …. auto-lauren … octo-linen … ear, nose and throat guy. He decided that she was having trouble with her sinuses, but he said he had a fix for that.

I looked up sinuses on-line to see what he might be talking about. Guess what? Sinuses are just holes in your skull. Sort of like damp, gooey caves hidden behind the bones of your face. So, in essence, the doctor was saying that my wife had holes in her head and that was the problem.

Aside: my wife is staring at me with the same frightening intensity of a buzzard watching the slowest wildebeest in a migrating herd. Let me continue in a more scientific vein.

Sinuses are cavities in the skull which serve three primary functions; they warm and moisten the air we breath, they reduce the overall weight of the skull, and they provide employment for a whole bunch of medical specialists including pharmacists, general practitioners, and (most importantly) surgeons … like my wife’s ear, nose and throat guy.

The whole thing seemed a little suspect to me. Let me review the facts. The sinuses are little cave-like openings in the skull. There was a problem, but the doctor was sure he could solve it by operating. How do you operate on a hole? Did he plan to fill them in? Reupholster them, maybe? Should I have advised my wife to go with a conservative striped fabric or the flashier-but-more-likely-to-look-dated-sooner paisley print?

Aside: my wife is gazing at me in a way that puts me in mind of Cyclops from the X-men. I’ll just get back to the topic at hand, shall I?

Although he presented it in a highly technical manner, the doctor’s plan was that he would shove some kind of flexible device up my wife’s nose and clean out the offending sinus. He didn’t call this surgery, he called it a “procedure”. As far as I’m concerned, a procedure is a set of instructions for doing something straightforward like assembling a spacecraft or disassembling a bomb or unblocking a sink. Speaking of which, it occurs to me that I have a small plumber’s snake and recently performed a similar “procedure” on our kitchen sink when the drain backed up. Maybe we should have saved some money, skipped the surgery and I could have solved the problem with some good, old-fashioned DIY.

Aside: My wife…never mind. On with the story.

The first step to performing surgery is breaking down the patient’s resistance to the idea of willingly subjecting themselves to the “procedure”. The usual approach is to deny the prospective patient food or drink for at least twelve hours. At the end of that time, they’ll be positively anxious to cooperate if it means they’ll eventually be allowed to eat again.

Of course, some patients come back after the surgery — once they’ve been permitted food again — and claim to have had a change of heart. They didn’t really want the surgery, they were just hungry and collaborating with the medical personnel seemed to be the easiest way to get food. To prevent any messy legal entanglements, the healthcare community now requires patients to sign a ream of documents covered in dense gray text printed in a font that would seem small to cockroach.

With all of the formalities taken care of, the patient is whisked away to the humiliation room where they are forced into an unfashionably loose cotton garment before being examined, inspected, poked and prodded. If they’re healthy enough the surgery is declared a “go” and the countdown begins.

In my wife’s case, just before the surgery the anesth …. unesthat … annie-this … guy with the knock-out medicine, came in and told her about all of the drugs he’d be using to make sure she didn’t feel sick when she woke up. He threw around names like Decadron and Zofran. I recognized them both from my years of watching TV. Optimus Prime ordered the Autobots to capture Decadron in the second season. And I’m pretty sure that the Power Rangers had to battle Lord Zofran after he threatened the town of Angel Grove.

Aside: my wife’s giving me “the look” again.

The knock-out doc promised my wife two things; 1) the procedure would almost certainly go well and 2) she’d be in some discomfort when she woke up. I give him points for honesty, but now I know why he went into medicine instead of marketing. I can’t imagine him successfully selling a service with the slogan, “It’ll make you better … but it’s gonna hurt!”

Finally it was time for the actual surgery. My wife handled her part perfectly, falling asleep on cue and then lying quietly. The doctors did a good job too and a couple of hours later I was reunited with my wife in the recovery room where she looked … pretty much the way she had before the surgery. Sadly, sinus surgery isn’t one of those operations where you wind up with a cool scar to show off. The best you can do is point vaguely up your nose and say, “It’s up in there.”

For post-op instructions they told me to take over the routine housework and let my wife rest for a week or so. They also added that she was to avoid lifting heavy objects for a month. Oddly, the definition of heavy objects included such things as toilet brushes, feather dusters, and dish rags. Still, I didn’t mind. I was just glad she was finally going to be right in the head.