Laser Nose Surgery

Since I came to Japan almost three years ago, my allergies (which I honestly didn't know I had until I came to Japan) have gotten gradually worse. At first I thought it was just a cold that wasn't going away... then after I had a cold for like half a year I realized that maybe it was something different. I went to almost all of the ENT doctors in my town. They all told me it was a cold. Then one told me it was allergies. I took a bit of medicine for it, and it wasn't really working as well as I'd hoped.

So I went to the hospital and told them all about it. So I systematically tried all kinds of different combinations of medicine. I found one combination that worked some-what decently, but I was still not 100% satisfied. So I talked to them about other options and they mentioned nose surgery. They told me about using lasers to do it and how easy and quick it is.

Basically what they did was 'laser' away the inside of the depths of my nose. To get technical, I think it's called a turbinectomy. Basically the turbinates in my nose, because of allergies, kind of puff up to the point that it's extremely hard or impossible to breath through my nose. I think it's kind of like trying to breath through one of those coffee straws.

It ended up being a very quick surgury. The prep was very fast. It was funny because I had taken my blood pressure, kind of playing around, while waiting... then they came out to check my tempturature and my blood pressure. I gave them my resutls and that sped things up. So we got started ahead of schedule! The actual surgury itself took less than 30 minutes. I was so worried the whole time... I was totally sweating and shaking when it was over. It took a while for me to get out of 'shock', but it was more or less painless. It actually felt like getting shocked in the nose. It didn't really hurt at all (of course they had shoved a bunch of novocaine-like substance up my nose before hand). The 'shocks' kind of tunneled their way through my head. So sometimes I could feel my k9 teeth kind of rumble and one time I felt the sensation go to my eyes. So it was kind of weird and uncomfortable.

As for the results, I don't really know yet. They do one session, your nose puffs up inside (which kind of defeats the purpose haha), you wait two weeks until your nose goes back to normal, and then they do it all over again. So I'll hopefully be doing fine by May! I will post an update when that time comes.