I’ve had some kind of sinus condition for about three months now. I sound a little like a Muppet…or maybe a Fraggle. Nothing more or less than that really – except that my singing voice is shot as well, which is highly disappointing to the Skirt who enjoys my regular re-writings of pop songs to include bawdy and sometimes illegal lyrics.

At first I thought it was Atlanta’s sub-awesome air quality and the fact that I was walking to and from work in it. The doc told me to lay low until the air cleared a bit and see if it cleared up. It didn’t. I went back in still all nasaly and weird sounding, so she gave me one of those snorter things that you spray up your nose. Nasonex is what I think it was called. So I sprayed that stuff into the snotlocker for two weeks and enjoyed zero relief.

I went back again, and my doctor (like most doctors) is on the big “don’t hand out antibiotics” kick. She decided that since we had tried an anti-allergen and a steroid, she’d try a round of whatevermacillin. “Come back in two weeks if it hasn’t cleared up.” She said.

I’m not knocking my doctor, but I was going broke one $15 co-pay at a time. Two weeks later and fresh out of antibiotics, I decided to find a specialist. The guy who is renting my condo is a Radiology resident at Emory and he recommended an Otolaryngologist, which is actually a word I didn’t make up. He’s the lead sinusmaster at Emory University Hospital and his rookie card is supposedly worth thousands if you can find it.

Here’s the thing when you go to see the guy who invented the mucous membrane – you have to wait a while until he has time to see you. 4 weeks later I was in his office waiting patiently to figure out if he can fix me.

Here’s the other thing – you have to see like a thousand other people before you can see him. I’d guess it’d be like having Oprah as my proctologist. There’d be screening phone calls, meetings with her producers and handlers, at least one glove fitting, and finally I’d get to experience the gentle nature of her large yet nimble hands. I had to register when I came in with nurse Lasheika Washington-Jackson (who had a delightful tattoo of a larynx on her lower back), before I was handed off to the other nurse who weighed me and took my blood pressure and temperature. Here’s a good joke if you are fast enough to make it work – as she turns around to grab the infrared temperature sensor to stick in your ear, drop trou and spread your cheeks. Just grab your ankles and look back at her from between your legs. That kind of shock on someone’s face is priceless.

After that, another entirely different person came in to axe me about the exact nature of my problem (the same problem I had explained on the phone, in at least one email, and written in longhand in the essay portion of the waiting room entrance exam). So I told her I was all snotted up in the cranial region, occasionally glancing at the diagram on the wall to reference some of the big words I saw there.

“I don’t know what started it, but it feels like neckular congestion of the palletar tonsils ranging from the thyroidal anterior ligament to the loogeybox. Heh heh. But I’m not the doctor. Is he here, or do I have to go talk to a glowing ball of light mysteriously suspended between two outcroppings at the top of a mountain?”

Okay Mr. Scott. Dr. Delgaudio will be right with you.

Delgaudio. If I wrote an action movie where the leading character was an ear nose and throat specialist, that would be his name. I don’t know his first name (it’s probably actually “Doctor”), but I’d give him a name like “Dr. Chase Delgaudio” or maybe “Maxillary Delgaudio, Savior of the septum and Righter of Rhinitis”

I moved the chair into the corner, relatively certain that Dr. Delgaudio would come blasting through the wall in a Ferrari made of cartilage.

He didn’t. Instead another guy who turned out to be a resident at the hospital came in and asked me (again) what problem I was having. He could have asked anyone in the entire building at this point. He did the thing where they thump on your face and ask if stuff hurts. “No, Nope, No, uhh… woah. Where’d you go, doc? Holy crap. I can’t see. Haha Just pulling your leg, bro.” Then he looked in my ears and made some mmm hmm noises. And finally he produced a glass jar with a hose on it and a plastic device that looked like it could be used to inseminate a moose.

I didn’t know that my nose holes went any further back than about a knuckle or so, but they actually go way back there. He said, “now I’m gonna’ spray some stuff in there that will numb up the tissue so you won’t feel the scope when I hammer that bastard into your skull.” He sprayed it in, and took it out before it was done spraying, which got a decent amount of it in my eyes as well.

Then he got out the boogerscope. It was a thin wand about eight inches long with a light on the end of it. He stuck it in my nose and watched whatever it was on a television behind me. Having never seen the inside of my sinuses (but being a curious person by nature), I wanted to look.

Trying to turn your head while someone has a spike seven inches into your nose is something you’d assume was a bad idea, and you’d be so correct that I can’t even begin to explain it. All of the numbing juice in the world won’t hide that kind of pain.

Finally Dr. Delgaudio came in. I was wrong about his entrance. The Ferrari was actually made of esophageal tissue.

Men aren’t generally as jealous of each other as women are, but we do get a certain sense of “Dammit” when the fancypants doctor is tan and chisled and rich and good looking and all of the crap we have long since given up on. He did the same face-tapping thing and then he got out the scope again, and holy shit did he ever bring the pain.

He wasn’t shy about jabbing that thing into my brain stem, but I was afraid to move for fear he’d pull it out with my spinal cord hanging off of it. I was protesting as sternly as possible without moving. “Yo, seriously Doc. That…FUCK. Take that goddamn thing out of there. I’m not kidding, dickface. I’ll kill you.” My eyes were streaming tears and it took everything in my power not to kick him in the balls, break his wrist, and drive off in his Esopharrari. My hands kept instinctively going up to push that thing out of my nose, and he kept saying “Just hang in there. You’re fine”

“No. Not fine. SeerimuslyCanyou gahhhAHH…fuckFUCK. I hate you.”

Finally he was done.

“Hey, next time just go in through my asshole and spare me some pain. That SUCKED. Did you train with Al Qaeda or something?”

“Nah, that wasn’t so bad. I didn’t feel a thing.”

Ha. So Dr. McSqueamy has a sense of humor, too. Dear diary…

I flipped him off while he wasn’t looking, wiping my eyes with a tissue in my other hand, and I’m sure looking very much like a pussy. The resident assisting him thought that was funny.

Delgaudio hath decreed that I need a quick cycle of Prednisone. It is a steroid that I remember having taken once before. Take a fistful at a time for the first five days, than half a fistful for three days, then like two a day for two days, then rape someone for wearing the same shoes as you, and whatever.

Possible side effects: (when I read this stuff, all it says to me is “DUSTY CAN EXPECT THE FOLLOWING IN SPADES, UNLESS IT IS A PLEASANT SIDE EFFECT LIKE EUPHORIA, SENSITIVITY TO ALCOHOL, OR SWELLING OF THE GENETALIA”) Nervousness, difficulty sleeping, weight gain, loss of appetite, irritability, nervousness, infections, bloody turds, sweating, menstrual problems, nervousness, and a tendency to repeat oneself.

I was fine on Saturday after taking the first dose. Sunday I was pretty okay too, but had a sort of latent anxiety hanging out in the pit of my stomach. Last night I stared at the ceiling until 2 am and woke up at six this morning somehow exhausted yet completely unable to sleep. I’ve had a belly full of kittens all day and I feel like I could instantaneously accelerate to very dangerous speeds if startled, leaving my skin in a moist sticky pile on my chair. I’d just be a shiny bundle of subcutaneous fat and sinew streaking this way and that. I can also hear certain colors and when I belch I taste gunpowder. The idea of concentrating on anything is an absolute joke as well. Have you ever watched a squirrel try to cross the street and then realize there are cars coming from both directions? You know how he just flips out and skitters all over the place wishing a tree would sprout up from the middle so he could climb the hell out of it? Well, right now I could totally school that squirrel.

But my nose is getting better, thanks.

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