The reason I originally went in, way long ago, is a condition called
Patulous Eustachian Tubes. On the one hand, this condition has probably helped me be a better voiceactor and sound engineer. On the other hand, as it progresses with age, it tends to lead to more uncomfortable symptoms, like the severe, chronic tinnitus that my mother now lives with (from whence I apparently got the genetics for said gigantic eustachian tubes.) It would seem that I am due for her fate someday, so I went in just to talk to them about it, and see if there was anything I could do now that would slow the progression and just sort of keep things where they are forever.
The doctor (who is the same lady who took out Minifob's tonsils, and has done work on several other friends and their kids, and whom I trust completely,) noted my deviated septum, and the fact that my turbinates were not only sort of thin and swollen, but that they actually spun the wrong direction. It's a pair of corkscrews, that are supposed to mirror each other and spin upward and outward, but she showed me on the CAT scan how my turbinates rotate
inward, which has probably contributed to a lifetime of mild congestion. It's not horrific, it's just always there 100% of the time--I told her I didn't feel like I had problems with congestion, and then she sprayed this industrial-strength decongestant all way up the back of my nose, and
all this drainage came out, and it was like, "Oh, is this what it feels like for normal people to breathe? Huh."
Anyway, she said that there really isn't much she can do about the eustachian tubes until the problem is bad enough to warrant a surgery to try to close them manually (which isn't what I want right now, but by the way, I'm going to send my mother in to see you...) BUT she convinced me that solving the chronic congestion and deviated septum would lead to less swelling in the area, and that could quite possibly slow the lifelong stretching of my eustachian tubes. Or not. But it was a good thing for me to do, in any case. And all these people I know were telling me about how they had done it, and it had been such an easy procedure, life-altering, etc. etc.
I'm embarrassed to admit that, in the end, the deciding factor was that we've met our out-of-pocket maximum for the year. Anyone in the family can get any procedure done before the end of the year, and it's completely free. So all the things we think we'll probably have to get done in the next 2 years, we're trying to make them happen before December. I figured, why not, throw the sinus thing in there too.
Except now I know why not.
It's okay, I am slowly getting better. I'm sure that, if I hadn't been such a bleeder, my experience would have been the same as other people's. No one was expecting me to be a hemophiliac only in my nose and nowhere else.