Please indulge me for a little moment of personal story-telling in hopes someone will see the value in it, and especially directed at men of my age who came up playing high school sports back in the 60’s and 70’s when, unless there was exposed bone sticking out where it shouldn’t or a joint wasn’t twisted at least 90 degrees out of position, to “rub some dirt on it and get back in the game”.
About a decade ago or thereabouts, I was sitting in my work office in Rosyth, Scotland, minding my own business and getting a presentation ready for the folks back in Houston. As I sat there staring at my computer screen, a red splotch hit the papers on my desk. My nose had started bleeding. I had never had a nosebleed unless it was immediately preceded by a substantial shot to the honker, so it was a bit of a curiosity.
The most disturbing thing was that I couldn’t get it to stop.
I’ve never had any clotting issues, but it just wouldn’t stop, so I was taken to the local NHS GP who shoved a tampon (literally) up my nostril to stanch the flow, which it successfully did.
I do know what it is like for my dogs to wear the plastic cone of shame after a treatment or surgery, because I wore that tampon for about three days, the string hanging out and all, until they were sure the bleeding had stopped, and they could use silver nitrate to cauterize the offending blood vessel(s).
They did, and it worked.
Tampon free and bleeding stopped, I went my merry way, never to sin again.
That is until about two months ago.
I was sitting at my computer here at home one morning, and the same Scottish drip hit the papers on my desk. This time conventional methods stopped it in short order, so I went about my day.
But it came back. Every few days, I would be sitting at my desk (it always happened early in the morning) and it would bleed, each time getting more difficult and time consuming to stop. My long-suffering wife urged me to get an appointment with my doc and have it looked at, but I chose to rub a little dirt on it and get back in the game. It was still happening, just at longer intervals, until I finally took her advice and got an appointment. The appointment was about a month out, and I had been three weeks free since a very minor bleed, so she took blood, the tests showed nothing, then looked at it and for safety’s sake sent me to an ENT doc, whom I saw last Thursday.
He did an alien abduction depth probe on my prominent proboscis and pronounced there were a few areas from which the bleed likely originated and decided to cauterize them as was done in Scotland.
Procedure done, no issues, and I applied the antibiotic ointment as directed on Friday and Saturday.
Then Saturday afternoon as I plopped down on the couch to watch the second half of Ole Miss v. Troy and get ready for the Utes and Gators, the flood gates opened. Blood was gushing from both nostrils, and I could not get it to stop. After about 30 minutes of trying, I yelled to my wife that I had to go Urgent Care. Wheels up to the Intermountain Healthcare UC about 5 minutes away and after about an hour, they couldn’t stop it either. By that time, the large hand towel Debbie tossed me on the way out was saturated with blood and the decision was to wheel me across the parking lot to the ER in another building where they had more tools with which to work.
The ER doc began working on me, trying to get the vessels to constrict – even applying a tincture of cocaine, while I thought about Hunter Biden and remarked that I had never done cocaine but I had never envisioned my first time wouldn’t include a young Michelle Pfeiffer or Al Pacino in the background screaming “Say hello to my little friend!”
That didn’t work and I continued bleeding.
The finally decided to go with something guaranteed to stop it, basically inserting a balloon up my schnoze and inflating it, putting pressure on the bleeders until they could repair themselves. What we didn’t realize was that as much blood as was on the outside, and there was a substantial amount, there was an equal amount that had transited to my stomach via my sinuses. All in all, over that three-hour period, I had lost about a pint and a half of blood.
As they tried to insert the balloon, I passed out and awoke to nurses and techs cutting my shirt off and attaching me to the Matrix with bundles of wires. By 7 PM I was on a hospital bed, in a room getting an IV while they decided if I needed a transfusion.
I didn’t and as the IV kicked in and the bleeding was stopped, I began to regain my form and they let us go about an hour later. As I sit here today, I have a balloon up my left nostril and an appointment with the ENT guy tomorrow.
Had I tried to struggle with the bleed for another hour or so at home, I might have needed an ambulance ride. All the scabs from the Thursday cauterization had failed and I was bleeding from several locations. There are a lot of blood vessels in your nose and nothing short of a balloon was going to stop it.
The morals of the story is are these:
Don’t be a dumbass like me.
Listen to your body and the people who care about you.
Not everything can be cured by rubbing a little dirt on it.
I had a similar situation. I had surgery that caused me to need a catheter (you never want one of those). Two days after they removed it (very unpleasant), I ended up septic with 2 different blood infections. I was very sick, and my wife wanted to take me to the hospital. Nope, I was OK, just rub some dirt on it. She didn’t listen (women!) and called an ambulance. Spent 5 days in the hospital with all kinds of crap being pumped into me, and a month of pumping antibiotics into my arm every 8 hours.
That taught me a lesson - sometimes you need to listen to your wife. Not always, but sometimes.
Very sorry to hear this, Michael. Do you have good ENTs there? I hope they get you back in fine form in time for the games.