Much before people understood the benefit of N95 mask, I wore them with style which made people mistook me for a SoBo guy who couldn’t deal with the smell of Indian poverty. Little did they know that I carried an ultra sensitive and defunct respiratory system (still do) which gets irritated faster than a Liberandu or a Bhakt does on the internet.
I was born with five sense like most people but slowly that number started approaching 4. I was losing my sense of smell much like the world is losing its forest cover.
They say that if one of your senses gets weak, others get heightened to compensate for that. I had smell impairment and no, I did not start seeing across the walls or hear miles ahead. I didn’t become Daredevil who could block a rock to save Spiderman (if you didn’t get the reference, too bad you’re not nerdy enough.)
It took hydrogen sulphide in my chemistry lab or the undigested mooli parantha disguised as a fart to make me realise that I can smell a few things. I could never smell the good food, smell of a book (I could but it was very faint) or even the petrichor. On the flip side, I am hyper reactive to cigarette/bidi smoke, petrol/diesel smell, strong perfumes/deodorants etc. I work better than your smoke detector. Someone smokes a cigarette two rooms after mine, I can tell.
I had bronchitis and a reactive airway since birth and later developed sinusitis (essentially a najla which got its masters from Oxford) The issue with Sinusitis or Sinus (sounds cute no?) is that no one takes it seriously. You can neither get yourself a medical certificate nor you can gain sympathy. After all, it’s just a blocked nose. Only people with sinusitis can understand your issues.
After suffering for more than a decade, it got so bad during my MBA that I started bleeding at random times. So during my term break in the first year, I consulted a few doctors and they all suggested surgery as the only resort. The date was decided and I was to spend the new year in the hospital. Certainly not the new year new me I had thought of.
I had grown up watching Sanjeevni and House M.D. and I was expecting my operation experience to be either similar to what these shows showed. But then, I realized that House never treated anyone with Sinusitis, so I settled for Sanjeevni. Maybe Jennifer Wingett could at least do a temperature check, if not the frequent check-ups?
Fantasies aside, I went with my parents on the D-Day and got the pre-operation checkup done. I was told to sit in my ward, where the nurses would attend to me later. The first thing you’re told to do is to change into surgery friendly clothes and no one tells you how raunchy these clothes are.
1. The ONLY thing between my body and that dress was my integrity, fear of embarrassment and self-control
2. It had more laces than Madhuri Dixit’s blouse which she wore in Aaja Nachle movie’s final performance
3. It was bright orange for no reason at all. Were they expecting to see me glow at night?
After changing, the next stop was ECG.
Apparently ECG measures your heartbeat, which can never be normal if Jennifer Wingett checks it, so maybe this is why they avoid such scenarios. Remember the men will be men ad?
Since this was the first time that I was getting operated on, I was very curious to know about the whole process. I warned the head nurse before she could do anything that I will ask a lot of questions.
“If you get annoyed, let me know. I don’t want you to vent your anger in some medical way”, I told her.
She was really sweet and answered every question which seemed sane.
“Will this hurt?” was my first one.
“No, but you might feel ticklish.”
Damn, she was right. Before they plug the electrodes on your feet and turn you into a guinea pig, they apply a gel to increase the conductivity. Imagine a gel being applied to your bare chest with cold hands in the January winter. There’s no way it won’t tickle. It was awkward – in those orange raunchy clothes with laces open, three nurses applying a gel on my bare chest so they could check whether my heartbeat was normal or not. It was tough, but I passed the test. Zakir Khan would’ve been so proud of me!
Medical treatments make you realize that a lot can happen between the opposite sexes for good without making things awkward. ECG was the only fun part of the whole operation, filled with laughter. Going by the beginning I was very optimistic about the surgery being painless. I was correct – not completely though.
Post ECG, I was transferred to the OT – Operation Theatre. I was so disappointed by the absence of a red bulb over the OT’s door. I’m really tired of seeing the iconic things being replaced in the pursuit of modernisation.
On the inside, with all the cool machines and huge lights, it was something straight out of sci-fi movies. There I was asked to take some medicines and put on an oxygen mask. I so badly wanted to put on an oxygen mask for no reason.
Being a subject patient on the OT table is really fascinating. There are multiple screens next to you with colourful displays numerous data points which do not make sense to you. There is the familiar beep sound which you’ve seen go silent in movies and are well aware of the aftermath that follows. A host of wires are connected to you that feed data to the computer and you’re bound to feel curious about how they work.
So while the people around me were setting things up, I was carefully testing how the data flowed from my body to those screens. I started with holding my breath for seven-eight seconds to know if any of the parameters changed. It didn’t change much. Next, I tried taking out the clip off my finger. All readings went blank – mission accomplished. I put the clip back again, and then removed it again. Then I tried to find out the exact skin contact required to get the readings started.
Before anyone could declare me mad I stopped and went back to inhaling oxygen – purity in, impurity out! Pure oxygen feels funny. I don’t know how else to explain it. Oh, and it is tasteless as well. So those descriptions in our Chemistry textbooks were true. No fizzy effect as well. Bland is the word for oxygen.
You remember the entry of the protagonist in every action movie? Well, that’s how the head surgeon arrives. She entered in slow motion, with two juniors around her trying to get hold of information from her. There’s an aura around experienced doctors. Their calmness is worth drooling over. They can ask you the most embarrassing questions and tell you the most dreadful news with the same nonchalant tone.
They’ll just ask you anything, talk about random stuff and next thing you know is that you’ve been operated. I’m not kidding. This is what I remember before getting operated. One of her assistants was cutting my nasal hair (the costliest hair cut I’ve ever had.) Then she asked me whether I smoked or drank? And I asked her assistant on a very serious note whether there is any chance that I can turn into Deadpool or Batman because of some reaction to the medicines. Even Hawk Eye would do, but please say yes. He had the most pathetic reply to my serious query, “You already are a superhero!” How old was I to him? Five?
If that assistant is reading this by chance, please note that from next time just answer with a straight face and say no. Stop sounding like a fake PR act.
After that question, all I remember is being taken out of the OT and shivering like a fish straight out of water. The operation was over. I was to be kept under observation for an hour.
As you are aware, we breathe from our nose. When it is being operated, you breathe from your mouth. Try breathing only through your mouth for three hours without drinking water. You’ll be able to feel the Grand Canyon building inside your throat. And when you try to swallow your saliva (involuntary action) it feels as if two Flintstones are being grinded against each other. It was hell.
The worst part was you couldn’t drink water because post OT you’re not allowed to drink water if you’ve been given anaesthesia. My eyes were watery, not because of pain but because of some fluid passage being blocked as my nose was jam packed with medicine, cotton, and blood. So my eyes were as clueless as people post-breakup. My whole ENT area was in an emergency. They took their own time to get back to normal.
Every time I thought that I had gone through the worst, something worse would happen. The next challenge thrown at me was to swallow medicines. Again, try swallowing pills when your nose is as stuffed as the potato in a Samosa. I remained in this state for two more days. Then came the day when I learnt that the longest tunnel in the world is not in some mountains. It’s in your nose. I’m not joking!
I was told that cotton would be removed from my nose. I thought, “How bad it could be? I went through one hell hour post-surgery. Ain’t no thing as bad as that.
[Trigger warning, if you’re not comfortable with description of blood, mucous and similar stuff (although I’ll try to shield you with humor) you can skip this one. TL;DR operation was successful, I’m now able to breath properly.]
And boy I was wrong. Since the cotton was all covered in medicine and blood for two days, it had dried up. They did add a liquid to soften the stickiness, but it was still very painful — unimaginably painful. I could feel every vein of mine cursing the doctor. The cotton which came out was all dark red. When they pulled one cotton out I let out a sigh of relief. But the very next moment I realised that I still cannot breath from my nose. And that’s when they told me there is one more cotton to be pulled.
I’m sorry, what? If you just pulled out five-inch long cotton from one nostril, where the heck is the other one? Behind my eyes? Where is all this space coming from? The anatomy of the human body is beyond me.
Where was this 10-inch long tunnel in my nose? At one point I was worried that he’ll pluck my eyes out. It was crazy. I didn’t even know if they were still operating within the nasal jurisdiction) I don’t know how I managed that, but I survived. The first whiff of fresh air I inhaled after that was priceless. Worth all the pain I had to endure. Nirvana in every sense.
After breathing from both of my nostrils, I realised that I was operating on half the capacity. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t clear JEE. My brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen so maybe that’s why it couldn’t clear the cutoff. Can I get my scores rationalized again? Sorry took me a while to realise, after getting the correct supply of oxygen in my head. At least refund my exam fee? No?
And it is not over yet. Post OT, I had to clean the wounds inside the nose for faster and effective recovery. And to make matters worse, I had to return back to the college in a couple of days after surgery because the next term was starting. The wounds hadn’t healed completely and my nose used to bleed at random. The only way fix it while travelling back to college was to stuff my nose with a cotton dipped in alum water. It was hell. Remember the stings of pain we feel when we apply aftershave on our recently shaved face? Now imagine that with a thousand cuts inside your nose. That’s what I felt during the journey back.
Nonetheless I reached hostel, all thanks to my elder brother and brother-in-law who drove me back to the campus safe and sound. And now for the next one month, I had to get into the shoes of Walter White, mix a drug or two to get the perfect nasal cleaning solution and do a jal neti to clean the wounds. When I explained the process to my roommate, he politely said that he will go out of the room whenever I would do it since he got all dizzy around blood and injections.
This too involved pain, blood, and the inseparable mucous. My hostel room had turned into a drug alley, with unpronounceable labels and chemical glass bottles all around. The lady who cleaned my room used to look at me as if I was the reason behind the Punjab’s drug crises. I had to thrust a jet of that medicinal water from one nostril and it would come out of the other side bring with it a lot blood, clot and mucous. I had to rinse and repeat from the other nostril too until the 250ml solution was all in the sink before I was dead. Luckily, I always survived.
After a month of numerous curses at doctors during cleaning, becoming an expert at drug mixing, watching my nose expel out mucous and blood in every form possible, learning to clean a nose in 4 ways possible, I could finally breathe fairly well with both my nostrils at the same time. I also stopped that horrendous cleaning procedure. Life got back on track. After a year from here, I was able to complete that trip to Tunganath.
Sinusitis doesn’t really have a permanent fix. The pain can return, and surgery is often the only option. But oddly, I’m not afraid of that anymore. Because it took this painful stretch to make me notice something I had completely forgotten.
For the first time, I could recognise the fragrance my wife wears. I know she’s home even before I see her, just by the familiar softness of her shampoo filling the room. And my daughter — she carries a scent that is unmistakably hers. One breath, and I know she’s mine.
It’s strange how pain can sharpen gratitude. How something as ordinary as breathing can turn into a quiet gift. I don’t know what the future holds medically, but for now, every deep breath feels fuller, warmer, and deeply personal — filled with the people I love.
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