And it goes on and on and on...

Rewind 15 days ago...

It was a Friday and I was just starting to reap the benefits of my op when my nose smelled funny.  I thought maybe I was coming down with a cold.

next morning there was no cold but there was a fever, very sore nose and nerve pain in my teeth was back...not to mention really icky stuff coming out of my nose when I did the sinus rinses.  I was feeling exhausted and feverish and just plain awful.

I waited til Monday and luckily my surgeon was in his rooms close to home.  We had a chat and he also suspected post-op infection which is supposed to be "rare" especially given I had a course of antibiotics to prevent this kind of this after my surgery.

He then led me to the treatment room and did an endoscopy!  I thought he'd just LOOK in my nose!  As awful as the local anaesthetic spray for that is, the bill is far worse.  Last time I got the camera treatment I was handed a bill for over $300.

He must have felt sorry for me since he bulk billed everything.  Gave me a script for antibiotics and 1 repeat which he thought I shouldn't need but it was there just in case.

I filled the script and noticed some improvement over the next few days but not enough.  I filled the repeat and no further improvement so yesterday I went back to see my surgeon.

This time he didn't stick any cameras up my nose.  He snipped the stitches to help them fall out since most of the suspicious areas seemed to be around the stitches and gave me a script for what he said was the strongest nose antibiotic there is.

The main concern for both us is any infection settling onto my artificial joint and after last year's scare I'm not taking any chances!

The down side to all this is that the antibiotic is not covered by PBS and has really REALLY nasty side effects such as nerve damage, heart damage, tendon rupture, psychosis, really high or low blood sugar, increased brain pressure and overgrowth of a really nasty bacteria in the bowel.

Granted these side effects aren't all that common but we all know my track record when it comes to getting rare side effects.

Still...most of these can be reversed...most of the time and the consequences of my joint becoming infected would be far more devastating and difficult to cure so the risk is worth taking.

Just to make matters more difficult, products containing magnesium, calcium and iron need to be avoided while taking this med since it interferes with absorption.

A host of other drugs interact with it including NSAIDs.

So when I got home I got my tweezers out and pulled out as many stitches as I could (except one really stubborn one which I trimmed back) and I feel so much more comfortable.

I'm getting more tired than less so I haven't gone back to sewing yet.  I'm having a lot of trouble focusing my eyes on fiddly tasks and keeping my hands steady so most of my hobbies are more of an ordeal than a pleasure at the moment!

So here's hoping in 14 days time I'll be feeling fab and able to do the next stage of my treatment.  Til my nose is declared functional I can't do the sleep study...and my frame of mind isn't strong enough to deal with whatever bad news the jaw specialist has for me!