Moving Forward

It's been so long since my last post, a lot has happened, but trust me, I still feel terrible every day. I wake up at least once a night, every night, and feel anxious with this suffocating feeling every day. My chest feels as if it's locked out like I'm taking a breath and I can only breath in a little more. My heart constantly races and I completely lose my concentration on my current task at hand. My only relief is that this plague has only effected my left inferior turbinate, so essentially I have partial Empty Nose Syndrome (ENS). This requires me to modify my life extensively - always leaning to my left, using Afrin when I need to do important things or things I want to enjoy like an interview or vacation. Afrin helps my right side to reduce, allowing me to breath more easily, however there is rebound congestion which is absolutely terrible for the proceeding 3 days after it starts.

I'm 24 years old, almost 25 and had this surgery just prior to my 21st birthday... so I'm 4 solid years of having this terrible syndrome and it has definitely ruined my life and will do so for the foreseeable future. My academic life has suffered, my social life has suffered, my romantic life has suffered... It's effected my mental ability - it's almost imposable for me to concentrate mentally or physically, I always have a shakiness to me like I have adrenaline in me - I can't hold things still, my heart is constantly fluctuating in heart rate and I feel weak and severely light headed sometimes, and my sleep is an absolute train wreck.

After my last blog, I was assigned to Dr. Michael Lupa at Kaiser Permanente (KP) who apparently took on cases of ENS. He was a genuinely good physician that ended up performing a slight septoplastly of my lower nasal septum to try to lessen the amount of air traveling to my left nostril. (This occurred in 2015) It ended well and nothing got worse, and may have slightly gotten better, but not enough. We were going to move on from there and try an implant or reduction of my right inferior turbinate (I am very apprehensive about reduction surgery). My new surgery was scheduled in May 2016 and Dr. Lupa left KP. This devastated me because I began to trust him because my trust was broken by Dr. Ann Richardson with my original surgery. Before he left, he recommended Dr. Victoria Epstein to see me and prosily treat me... so I contacted her.