Several years ago I let a surgeon stick a scalpel down my throat in the hope that he could cure my snoring. This is an account of the operation and its aftermath that I sent out to friends at the time.
When the surgeon contacted me six months after the operation to gauge its success I told him that I was not snoring any more.
Had he contacted me a week later my answer would have been different. Six years later I still spend most of my nights sleeping on a lumpy lounge.
FOR those who inquired about how I’ve been since the operation ‑ and for those who don’t know I had an operation ‑ I offer this as a kind of FAQ. (A small warning: much of the following is not for the easily-queased or those with the usual boundaries of good taste.)
The hospital
I don’t like to malign an institution dedicated to the repair, betterment and saving of lives but …
The nurse comes to prepare me for the table and tells me I have to remove all my jewellery.
“The anaesthetist, right?” I say.
She looks at me.
“He’s light-fingered?” I smile.
“Dr Fu Man Chu* is a highly qualified medical man of fine reputation.”
“Surely he goes through patients’ pockets while they’re under. He’s human, isn’t he?”
My smile fades.
“Gowns don’t have pockets. Now remove your fillings.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re not the only one who can joke." She smiles without humour. "Don’t remove your
fillings. We’ll do that while you’re under.”
(* Not Dr Moriarty’s real name.)
The operation
Piece o’ piss, as they say. Slept through the whole thing. Woke up not so good. Told the nurse the pain killers were not working. They should be, she insisted. Well they’re bloody not, give me more, I’ll do anything. I’ll shag you. I’ll make love to you. Right now. (The woman was most unattractive, you understand, no Benny Hill medical aide in short uniform and eye-catching décolletage, so this was an attractive and no doubt unique offer for her.)
Spent a day and a night on a narrow bed in a small, characterless ward pissing into a bottle, gauze taped under my nose to catch the bleeding, and rejecting the food offered (hot tea, toast and cornflakes for a throat surgery patient) before deciding that if they couldn’t do anything more to make me comfortable or humour me when I make offensive jokes I might as well be miserable at home.
They wouldn’t let me leave before lunch because I’d been vomiting blood into a bedpan (it had been dribbling down my throat into my stomach) and I was a tad delirious (offering ugly middle-aged nurses sexual bribes). I was little better in the afternoon but I concealed that I’d still been vomiting then dressed, packed my bag and swayed impossibly as I signed out. The nurse who discharged me knew I wasn’t fit to leave but was sick of my insulting jokes and delirious advances. Susie came and took me home.
Then came what I look back on fondly as The Days of Excruciating Pain. After four days of this ‑ of being unable to eat, think or move from the lounge ‑ it seemed that a kind of fog lifted from my eyes and I saw the world clearly for what it is: a sweet, beautiful thing that you take for granted until allowing a madman with a scalpel to slice fillets from your mouth and excavate the passages of your nose to permit easier breathing. “Nose job” is such an ugly expression. I prefer “laser palatoplasty with septoplasty, intranasal antrostomies and turbinate trim”. Less social stigma.
Lose 4kg in Four Days with Gordon’s Snoring Operation Diet – No Will Power Required!
The key to the success of this diet is within financial reach of all: teeth-aching brain-in-a-blender pain. Combined with the disorienting effects of the painkillers you have no idea of what’s going on around you. This means:
• Eating is the last thing on your mind!
• Ditto drinking!
• When survival instinct insists you do try to eat and drink, the impossibility of swallowing minimises the quantity you can consume. When sipping even single drops of water leaves you wanting to scream as each tiny parcel of H2O trickles past the sutures at the back of your mouth, the desire for a full tummy diminishes. No food = no calories!
• The attendant constant, severe nausea is an excellent appetite suppressant!
• A violent headache also helps preoccupy you and banish thoughts of calorie-adding basic sustenance!
• When you can barely see through the fog of pain, the idea of eating – like everything else – makes no rational sense. Food, you say? Eat? Where is that voice coming from? Who? I’m married? Get away from me, evil beast, I see your horns …! Gnaaaaaaaaarjsh…
But seriously
I’m not kidding about the pain. Until that magical moment on the Sunday afternoon when the sun broke through the pain-fog it was so severe I really couldn’t think straight. Since the fog cleared I have been able to swallow – now it only feels like having a white-hot scalpel drawn across pink flesh as each thoroughly chewed, carefully moistened morsel eases past the suture/s at the back of my throat. I am so looking forward to a time when eating is only as painful as chewing salted razor blades. The joy of toast seems an impossible fantasy.
On taste
My sense of taste has been hampered by – sorry to get all medical jargony – by all this thick sticky lacquering gunk coating my mouth and tongue. It’s a combination of the hemagloby mucoidy viscousy elements of the blood that has been seeping into and hardening in my nose/throat/mouth. For those with knowledge of the rhythm method, this unnecessary metaphor will nail the image: if my mouth were a vagina, you would be certain that I am ovulating.
Now that I have an appetite and am willing to bear the pain to eat (but only after three Nurofens), the problem is that because of the gunk I can’t taste anything. So desperate am I for flavour, any flavour, before eating I gargle a potion comprising paint stripper, vinegar, menthol this, banned chemical agent that, and a dab of honey (it soothes the throat). For all I know, the concoction tastes like Moet. It doesn’t wholly revive the tastebuds but does clear enough of the mouth-sludge to allow the faint suggestion of a distant memory of flavours I might have once known to seep through. Bliss.
Wait, there's more
There’s much more detail I could share (such as the countless cotton hankies full of little bloody Rorschach blots), but you’ve indulged me enough already by reading this far. Suffice to say I’m well enough to get back to the office by the end of the week.
Did the operation work or does Gordon’s Midnight Express still snore/roar through the Parkdale domicile? Alas, it does. But that’s to be expected, we’re told. What with all the swelling of innards, clogging of vents etc, clear breathing is still months away – if the operation does what it was meant to do. And if it doesn’t, at least I’ve lost some weight.
Further information
• General on sleep disorders: http://www.sleepnet.com/disorder.htm
• For articles from Nose News, the journal of St Joseph’s Hospital Nasal and Sinus Centre (Orange County, California): http://www.sjhnasalsinus.com/nosenews.htm (plus a terrific explanation of the causes of snoring from the same site: http://www.sjhnasalsinus.com/snoringsleep.htm)
• A Korean-language website that’s useful for some crude illustrations that give a pretty good idea of the scraping/excavation visited upon the inside of my head: http://www.ajou.ac.kr/~ent/RHINODATA/maxillary.htm
• A forum discussing the septoplasty operation: http://www.medkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/sinusitis/802/Septoplasty-healing-time
• Want to know more about sepotplasty and submucous resection (who doesn't)?http://www.healism.com/procedures/eyes,_ears,_nose,_and_throat/septoplasty_(submucous_resection)/
• Sites for jokes about snoring:
http://www.jokedictionary.com/jokes/s/snoringjokes.html
http://www.snoremd.com/jokes.htm
The last word
A cure for snoring
A woman has a dog that snores in his sleep and goes to the vet to see if he can help. The vet tells the woman to tie a piece of ribbon around the dog’s testicles and he will stop snoring.
That night, a few hours after going to bed, the dog starts snoring as usual, so the woman goes to a kitchen draw, grabs a piece of red ribbon, and ties it around the dog’s testicles. Sure enough, it stops snoring. The woman is amazed.
Later that night the woman’s husband comes home drunk from a night out with his mates. He climbs into bed, falls asleep, and starts to snore loudly.
The woman wonders whether the ribbon trick will work on him, too. She grabs a piece of blue ribbon and ties it around her husband’s testicles. He stops snoring immediately and the woman has her best night’s sleep in many years.
The next morning, the husband wakes up with a shocking hangover and stumbles into the bathroom for a piss. As he looks down he sees the blue ribbon tied around his testicles and is confused. When he returns to the bedroom he sees the dog with the red ribbon around his scrotum.
He looks at the dog and says “I don’t remember what the hell we got up to last night but whatever it was it looks like we got first and second place.”
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