the ENT redux

He basically blew me off. (of course, there was that less than stellar review I wrote on the questionnaire they sent me after my first visit) We looked at the CT scan images of my nasal passages and he pointed out how constricted the left side is and how I don't breathe out of the left nostril because of this constriction which is why I breathe through my mouth and most people would have got that corrected. old news All this is damage from when I was 3 and broke my nose and my parents never saw fit to have it corrected later and then as an adult with no insurance and living and raising a family on an artist's income it was out of the question as long as it wasn't life threatening and it hasn't been life threatening. I am aware that my breath through one nostril is restricted, I take care to sleep with my nose and mouth not smooshed into the pillow, I don't like stuff around my face, I try to keep my nasal passages clear within reason. For the record, I can breathe out of my left nostril and only breathe through my mouth when I'm stopped up. It's not like what happens is a slow asphyxiation. When it happens it's sudden, one minute I'm fine and the next I can't breathe or just barely.

So he does the camera down the throat thing which didn't hurt (the attendant put numbing solution soaked cords in my nostrils first) and shows me my vocal chords and has me make noise and I see them constrict and he pointed the camera into my nasal passages. All looks good and right in there, no obvious malformations down there.

Then he kept pointing out this thing in the image of the CT scan in my nasal passage on the left adding to the constriction from the broken nose...a skin sac full of air. It was very clearly there (hmmm, I wonder if that's why the left side seems full so much more often) so a malformation there in that most people don't have this but I was born like this he says, born with it, that it shows up in about 15% of people. I'm like...OK, so this is something I've lived my whole life with and I'm not really sure what he's saying or recommending, it doesn't seem to be a problem that demands to be fixed to me unless it is or will get worse for which he didn't really have an answer. So yeah, OK, but what about the problem I'm here for, the whole suffocation/choking thing. Perhaps I should get a second opinion, he said, because he could not see anything wrong, perhaps another doctor would be able to see something he wasn't able to, and he was done. What a colossal waste of time and money. I got more attention and useful information from the speech therapist that helped administer the barium swallow test than from this doctor.

So no. I'll not be going through this again just to find out what I already know, that it's just one of many swallowing disorders that you learn to manage among the many weird things that affect and afflict the ever diverse physical form of a human body, unless something extreme happens. 

Maybe I am choking, or rather, aspirating and not suffocating, only instead of one big thing blocking my airway, it's small droplets (saliva or liquid) that take some effort to expel. Who knows. The only answer is the same...mindfulness. Mindfulness when I eat and drink so I may be a pretty dull dinner companion from here on out, just saying.

But, y'all, I kept my promise and went to the doctor about it.