Previous article: Day 1
Day 2
To be honest, I'm not really sure where Day 1 ended and Day 2 began. Attempting to sleep didn't really work -- you have to keep your head elevated which means using multiple pillows, which means it's not comfortable.
More importantly, your nose is completely blocked from the surgery which means that whenever you do actually fall asleep, your body decides that it can't breathe and wakes you up again with a start. And this happens multiple times throughout the night.
The good news is, though, that this morning all the numbness has gone and I can finally eat without needing a mirror. I expected the numbness to be replaced by pain but there isn't any. Sure, my nose stings from time to time and I can often feel blood trickling down from the nostrils into the tampon -- a strange sensation where you have to desperately resist the urge to blow your nose or wipe it away.
I changed the tampon before bed last night, and it has got fairly bloody overnight, but no blood has ended up on the bedsheets, so I figure that's a win. Morning time is probably a good time to change it again, but the hospital only gave me four of them to take home, so I've got to think sparingly and not use them up too quickly. Let's live a little and start the day with a fresh one, why not!
Annoyingly, something has happened to my tear ducts as I seem to be slowly crying all day. Having to wipe away tears from my eyes brings back great memories of watching Titanic, but gets tiresome after a while. There's only so much emotion a man can take!
Evening time
It's now 7pm and if I could summarise the day so far, I'd use two words -- tired, and boring. You're supposed to stay at home for the first 48 hours for good reason, but there's only so much Netflix you can watch, especially while feeling tired and with running eyes. But at least there's a good excuse for crying when some soppy rom-com is on!
But, there's one final thing I need to do today. One of the most important post-op steps is to regularly clean out your nose, and you need to start doing that 24 hours after surgery.
I've been given a squeezy water bottle, into which you pour some lukewarm boiled water and add a saline solution. You then place it in each nostril in turn and squeeze, such that the water flows up into your sinuses and back out of the other nostril. Sounds great, but I had some fear about this -- surely it's going to push all the blood into the sinuses and it'll get stuck up there? But apparently the scientists have worked all this out and it's fine.
I'd read online that this bit can get messy, and you're best off standing in the shower rather than over a wash-basin. So, bottle in hand, I head to the shower and squeeze. What comes out are some rather large boogers, half snot and half blood. Lovely. In the mix, also a couple of large blood scabs fall out too. I guess that's probably what's supposed to happen, but who knows? You need to do this twice a day apparently so I guess I'll find out whether the same thing happens tomorrow!
Next: Day 3
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