Ask a Rhinoplasty Patient, Part III

Dear Rhinoplasty Patient,

Can you blow your nose?

Love,

Everyone

Dear Everyone,

I'm finally getting around to this question; I get it ALL the time. I'll try not to be graphic. But first, I went to the Kleenex website looking for a picture of a box of tissues. I'd like to pre-apologize to Eileen if this is her client, but, really now, their slogan is "let it out" and they allow you, nay, encourage you to plaster up pictures of your kids or write maudlin stories about your health problem, and then other people can send you "tissues" as encouragement. Maybe I'm just in one of my misanthropic moods, but it's stomach-turning. To sum up one of my favorite bloggers writing about the website PostSecret, are swaths of America so attention-starved that they need to make strangers on the internet feel sorry for them? Don't they have family to whom they can send their kids' pictures? For a society that cares so much about penumbras in the Constitution guaranteeing privacy rights, we certainly lack discretion.

Back to your question, blowing your nose immediately after surgery is verboten. First of all, physically, you can't. Your nose is blocked up for the first week, at least, and you have the splint on. You don't want to mess up your stitches and cause a nosebleed for the couple of weeks after that. Doc just said to squirt saline spray in my nose and that when I take showers, my nose would unclog. Not really. Although this wasn't recommended, I cleaned my nose VERY carefully with Q-tips or tissues. Some people on the internet suggested putting hydrogen peroxide on a Q-tip and swabbing your nose to get rid of the blood, but this might dry your nose out. Frankly, my nose alternated between runny and dry for many weeks, so I didn't need to introduce anything else to this equation.

Nowadays, since I know my wounds have healed, I do blow my nose. It's not terribly effective, but it's getting easier as the weeks go by. The problem is that my nose is stiff and, if you try blowing your own nose right now, you'll notice that you (probably) squeeze your nose and move it around a bit. Squeezing my nose is impossible and moving it around hurts.

So, yes, I do, but it's not the same.

The other part of this is sneezing--you have to sneeze with your mouth open. Yes, this is very weird. No, it's not hard at all to make yourself switch to sneeze through your mouth, it actually comes naturally. I suspect your body knows these things subconsciously, which is why you don't roll over onto your nose while you're sleeping.

Monday was seven weeks post-surgery. I do see little changes from time to time, but mostly, it's the same. I'm pretty sure even posting my photos here is little more than an exercise in vanity because I doubt you can see much of a difference any more. My nose hurts a little less. I do wear my sunglasses when driving; I have these cheapo ones that I've found I can get to stick to my forehead if I don't have to move very much, but it's still hard to walk down the street with sunglasses banging on your nose with every step, so I don't. I'm starting to be able to make scrunching faces with it, so I'm looking forward to the day when I have a full range of expression involving my nose (and perhaps my nose wrinkle).