results of my one week ear checkup

Hi, everyone.  Today’s big milestone with respect to my SCDS surgery recovery was my one week checkup with the surgeon.  Hurray, I survived the first week!  🙂

Dr. Gianoli said immediately that he thought I was looking good, as if perhaps some of his patients make their one week checkup appointments on hands and knees or something (geez, I hope not!).  He asked a bunch of questions, looked at a bunch of things, and did a few things.  Here’s how it all came out.

• He removed all the staples and sutures, and said the swelling is very minor which makes it easy to remove these things.
• He seemed a little surprised to hear that I couldn’t hear out of my right ear at all until he looked at it and saw that it’s filled with blood.  He didn’t like the idea of me flying home with all that blood in the middle ear, and recommended that I either (a) drive home or (b) have him do a myringotomy.  The myringotomy is just a hole cut in the eardrum to allow drainage and equalization of pressure.  We talked about the options a bit and I decided to go with the hole.  The impact of this is that I need to make an extra effort over the next few weeks to avoid infection.  I’ll be extra careful not to get water in my ear and Beth will also irrigate it with a sterile antibiotic solution daily.
• After I filled out the form authorizing him to do the procedure, he numbed the eardrum with a topical, and then cut the hole.  Then he suctioned out some gunk.  I never saw it, but I assume it was blood and stuff.  After he did that, I started to hear sounds in my right ear, though they don’t sound “right” since there’s still other gunk in that middle ear.
• He wants me to go have my CSF pressure checked again, so I made an appointment for tomorrow to have that done.***  I’m not allowed to eat after midnight, and they’ll give me lots of happy juice so I won’t care that I’m getting a needle stuck in my spine.  I’m supposed to be there at 11 AM.  Yes, it looks like yet another day of wearing a hospital gown, getting probed, and then sleeping it off all afternoon.  If the pressure level looks good, then I think we’ll stay with the current dose of my CSF pressure med.  If it’s too high or too low, then Dr. G will have to figure out something else.  But we do want to get my CSF pressure dialed into the normal range as part of all this since that may make some of my other symptoms go away.
• I also scheduled my next follow-up visit, which is for 5 weeks out.  I hope things are in such great shape in 5 weeks that the follow-up just amounts to this: “How’s the ear?” “Awesome, how are you?”  “Good, did you know Mardi Gras is this weekend?”  “Sure did.” “Examination complete!”  But we’ll see.  I don’t want to push things.  I think I pushed my recovery from my 2nd knee surgery too fast and that’s one reason I still have knee problems to this day.
• And finally I dealt with some administrative stuff.  It sounds like the various bureacracies still don’t have things lined up for my short term disability benefit.  Hopefully, one form I signed today will help with that.  Today was pay day at Polycom, and that reminds me that since I’m on unpaid medical leave someone else (my short term disability insurance provider, specifically) needs to be paying the bills.

I talked to the admissions clerk for the place where I’m getting the “lumbar puncture” done tomorrow.  She went through the usual medical history questions while Beth was driving.

And it was then that I finally got to whip out the zinger I’ve been waiting all week to use.  The conversation went something like this:

Clerk: Have you had any major surgeries?

Me: Well, as a matter of fact, yes.  I just had brain surgery last week.

Clerk: Oh.  Wow.  OK.  Other that that have you had any major surgeries?

Me: Nothing more major than that one.

Clerk: No, I imagine not.

Me: Just a couple of knee surgeries here and there in the past.

Clerk: OK, thank you Mr. Bradley.