@du6721-
•3 years of fascial/nasal swelling post surgery does not sound right.
•I’m sure you went for follow ups and were told you were healing fine and that inflammation/ swelling can take up to a year to go away. Am I correct?
•What happens during this time is that anything you may start to feel indifferent about is chalked up to healing nerves and swelling.
•If the nose is too open, and the tissue is exposed to too fast, dry air, swelling can occur as a defense mechanism and response, keeping your tissues in an inflammatory state, but we naturally think it’s from the trauma of surgery. So you keep just telling yourself “I’m swollen from surgery”. That is not the case.
•The swollen feeling is the tissue response to air not flowing properly and hitting nerves and tissues differently. Not having a streamlined smooth flow. Ultimately disrupting the entire nasal cycle.
•For example-lets say patient explains a subjective feeling of not being able to breathe trough right side. Well truth is you can breathe, it just doesn’t feel the same as on your left. So what could be a very small 1mm of space causing you to feel uncomfortable, a surgeon comes in and visually determines on their own, how much space you need to breathe. That is not how the body works. Another person, ENT, can not look at your nose and know what you would need to feel better. It is all a guess, and you hope it ends up close to comfortable.
So an ENT makes a 2mm difference on your inferior turbinate and then makes a 2mm difference in your septum. Now all of the sudden you a 4 mm difference when you barely needed anything. So you now have a new subjective feeling.
Although air felt constricted before it hadn’t disrupted a whole natural cycle.
•Antibiotics can also have an anti inflammatory affect. So if you took a round and feel more open, it could be that the antibiotics reduced the compensatory inflammation that had been occurring with the new changed airflow.
•Ultimately ENTs know little about the form and function of the nose. It is an embarrassing specialty that puts many patients at risk.