I have a new nose.
Well, almost, kind of, but yes, for all intents and purposes, a new nose.
The story goes like this.
My family tends to be, shall we say, well-supplied in the nosular department. However, as is typical of certain areas of Brooklyn, the construction quality leaves something to be desired. To be specific, I had a septum that looked like the path of the F train to Queens. Now, I did not know this, not having any real opportunities to examine my septum. And, of course, none of us realizes that our own experience is unusual; for example, Jane Lynch, the actor, is deaf in one ear, and didn’t realize until the age of 8 that both of them were actually supposed to be working. So there I was, marching through life with my adorable, curly little septa, whoofling and snoring and breathing through my mouth like a walrus, completely oblivious to the fact that the construction crew that built my nose, to put it kindly, was a few genes short of a DNA sequence.
Cut to: four years ago, when my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, managed almost to kill herself caring for her elderly, dying, immeasurably self-absorbed father (think Tony Randall, only more neurotic). SWMBT ended up with a sinus infection that lasted – count ’em – eleven straight months, I kid you not, and eventually, her doctor threw up her woo-woo hands and referred her to a surgeon named Peter Catalano, and here is where our story truly begins.
Dr. Catalano occupies an entire floor of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, much like a conquering king. He bears an uncanny resemblance to Frank Zappa. He’s a big deal because he does this astonishing laser-guided blah blah minimally invasive yada yada in by 9, out by 5, let’s Roto-Root your nose without actually taking your head apart surgery, and he’s one of, oh, fifteen people in the country who does it. He has minions. His minions have minions. The floors of his examining rooms have seven layers of varnish on them, like roller-skating rinks. The underminions examine you, and then they brief the minions, and then the heavens part and Dr. Catalano shimmers in, possibly levitated, and the minions brief him and he works his self-assured magic. I have never seen anything like it.
SWMBT had the surgery four years ago. After a lifetime of sinus infections, she hasn’t had one since. No packing, no pain, no half-assed results, just – fixed. My wife is a medical marvel – not in the good sense of the word – and we’re used to unsuccessful medical interventions, but this was one hundred percent marvelous. But yet, it did not occur to me that Dr. Zappa might be of use to me as well, because, as we’ve already said, I associated nothing unusual with whoofling and snoring and breathing through my mouth like a walrus. However, last summer, a friend of mine also consulted with Dr. Zappa, and the questions that she was asked which she relayed to me got me thinking.
So I went to see Dr. Zappa myself, and indeed, it turned out that I had some shoddy construction issues. In fact, at one point during my initial exam, he stopped scrolling through the MRI and actually said, “Hm. I’ve never seen that before.” (You do not want your doctor to say this.) And so a couple Tuesdays ago, I went over to St. Elizabeth’s around noontime, and at some point around 2:30 they turned on the IV drip, and I said, “Whoa, woozy” and then I woke up in the recovery room (I’m apparently very susceptible to anesthesia, and no, there isn’t any video). It takes a while for the swelling to subside, but after that, it’ll be, as they say, clear sailing.
Now, you might ask: should a singer be having sinus surgery other than at gunpoint? And the answer is: under normal circumstances, no. But Dr. Zappa isn’t normal circumstances, apparently; I quizzed him on this, as you might imagine, and he swore that he operated on singers all the time, and none of them had any trouble. Now, I can’t personally testify to this yet; but just in case, I did try to get all the vocals done for my album before the surgery (and it would’ve worked if it weren’t for those damn kids, er, snow).
At the moment, I still can’t tell you the outcome. It still feels like someone bopped my nose with a frying pan, which is not really conducive to singing, but if you come by on March 7, you’ll get to see and hear my new nose in its freeway-straight, non-walrus glory. Either that, or Dr. Zappa will have a lot to answer for.