I’m just gonna go ahead and say again this will definitely be TMI, but I really need to vent on this subject.
So about two months ago around the beginning of May, I discovered I had (what I thought at the time) was a zit in the inside of my nostril. It was annoying and hurt like hell so I did the appropriate thing and popped it to let it drain. Except it started bleeding. A lot. I’d never had nosebleeds before, but I imagine it was akin to something along those lines.
Eventually it stopped and scabbed over and I thought it would just heal. But to my chagrin, it would start bleeding again, sometimes at inopportune times during the day. Other times I would wake up from a good night’s sleep and find several bloody spots on my pillow. It was annoying. I would also have to clean out the dried blood from my nostril so I could breathe correctly, and that would usually start it bleeding again.
Finally at one point I was just like “You know what, I won’t even clean it anymore. I’m just going to leave it alone completely and maybe it’ll go away.” This was around the time where I went for a week’s vacation in Florida. I was very self-conscious because I had this dried blood/scab hanging out my nose and I knew I must look very attractive at this point. I left it alone, though, and thought it was finally healing. It would still bleed every now and then but it had mostly stopped. It was just difficult because it felt like I had a cotton ball or something shoved up my left nostril.
When I got back from vacation, my parents were worried about it since it hadn’t healed and so they wanted to examine my nose properly. Turns out, it was not just scabbing in my nose now…there was some sort of abnormal growth hanging around. My parents did the scientific thing and poked at it with a needle to see if there was pus or anything like that inside the growth, but all it did was bleed copiously. That explained where all the blood was coming from, but it didn’t explain what the hell was in my nose. My father, when I mentioned that I thought it started with a zit, said it might have actually been a cyst that I popped and I aggravated it somehow.
Whatever it was, we rushed to an emergency clinic (the only thing open at the time). The doctor there didn’t know anything (all he could tell me was that it was “definitely not a pimple”) and had me schedule an appointment for a specialist the next day. He said he didn’t think it was cancerous, though, which made me feel a little better.
The next day, the specialist examined my nose. He didn’t take too good a look at it because he knew it bled a lot and he didn’t want to aggravate it. He did say he thought it was a granuloma, possibly caused by an infection with an ingrown hair, and the best thing would be to surgically remove it. He also agreed with the other doctor and said it was highly unlikely it was cancerous. I felt a lot better knowing this.
So the next step would be to schedule the surgery. Now this was the beginning of June. I thought it would be a few weeks at most. But my appointment was scheduled for July 17th. Nearly a month-and-a-half wait. Apparently since it wasn’t life threatening I didn’t get a quick appointment. Sigh.
Since then, I’ve become more and more irritated with this damn thing in my nose. It still bleeds regularly. Now that it’s allergy season, I sneeze a lot more which irritates it enough. Can’t blow my nose properly because I’ll get blood. And plus I’ve grown a lot more self-conscious to the point that I hate doing anything outside the house because I know people will be looking at the growth hanging out of my nose. I actually accidentally snapped at a security guard yesterday at a social outing because he was asking if I’d gotten hurt somehow and wouldn’t leave me alone since my nose was bleeding. I know he was just doing his job but it’s a real sensitive point after two months of dealing with this.
The surgery’s going to be this Thursday. After they take it out, they’ll do a biopsy on it to determine what exactly it is. They say my nostril might look slightly different after the surgery and there might be some scarring, but I don’t care. I’ve started getting light headaches recently and I’ve never really had regular headaches ever before, and I think it might be related to the growth. I’m so ready for the surgery.
Bleh. Phew, that’s a big load off my chest. Just had to get that out there.
