Friday night around mid-night, just after I got into bed I felt some blood trickling down the back of my throat. I got up figuring I just had a nosebleed from the dry air in the house from having the electric heat on, something that does happen to me occasionally in the wintertime.
But this one wasn't like a normal nosebleed because I couldn't stop it. I tried pinching my nose for 15 minutes, tried packing it with cotton swabs and antiseptic gel, and all that stuff that you should do to get rid of a nosebleed, while these things helped slow down the bleeding a bit, it didn’t stop it.
So getting a bit worried I went to the emergency room at the Health Science Hospital. The emergency room doctor used a freeze spay to numb my nose, then packed it with a gauze soaked in mixture of adrenaline and cocaine to help constrict the blood vessels... But it didn't work, my nose was still bleeding!
So then they sent me to Saint Clare's Hospital (another hospital here in town) where they are better equipped to deal with nosebleeds. Anyway, to make a long story short after a while of poking, probing, and vacuum suctioning the blood away the ENT specialist found out that there was a blood vessel broken deep inside my nose.
So to stop the bleeding he packed it with a nasal pack that looked like a 5 inch styrofoam Popsicle stick and he jammed the full thing right into my nose! Talk about painful, I screamed out loud and said some things that I won’t repeat here. Then he squirted some water like solution inside my nose to expand the pack.
This eventually controlled the bleeding because the pack was deep inside my nasal passage and putting pressure on the broken blood vessel. Then the fun part... the doc said:
"We're going to have to keep you in here for at least 48 hours to make sure it doesn't start bleeding again."
Anyway after 3 days and 2 luxurious nights of being bedridden, doped up on painkillers, and dining on the "fine hospital cuisine" I'm home again. And the worst part is that I'm not allowed to workout or do anything strenuous for full 2 weeks because I may accidentally break open the blood vessel again.
That's the worse one for me. I can't remember the last time I took 2 weeks off from working out all together. Heck, even if I'm injured I'd still go to the gym and work around the injury. But this time around I can’t do anything physically demanding. I'm sure the break from the gym will probably be for the greater good in the big picture, but for now it's going to be a long 2 weeks...
Here I am typing up this blog post wearing my fancy "moustache bandage" to help catch the drainage from my sinuses... fun stuff :-(
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