I'm back

I'm "back" from surgery. Well, I'm sitting up again.

Not everybody I show this blog too knows about my medical history - I have had, for several years now (some of it since childhood) acute sleep apnea, chronic tonsillitis, and associated pneumonia, migraines, insomnia, and narcolepsy.

My count of waking incidents at night was 150 per hour. That means while trying to sleep, just about once every 22 seconds I would move to a lower stage of sleep or wake up altogether. My doctor said I was probably getting a true night of sleep - REM or deeper - once every six months or so. The upshot of this is terrible hallucinations, constant fatigue, and episodes of microsleep at dangerous times such as behind the wheel. Secondarily, my particular apnea was so bad that it was effecting my practice at the gym - I simply couldn't breathe, at all, through my nose and had trouble breathing through my mouth when on my back. Add to this 2-3 months of sick time out to extrenuous colds and tonsilitis and you can see a general health complex outlined that was really fucking up my cabbage patch.

So, finally, after literally decades of fighting this shit, I busted out the credit rating and just went to an Ear, Nose, Throat specialist. He immediately scheduled me for surgery. The thing is, what I'm having trouble expressing here, is that while it was obvious that I has some nasal problems, most of these things, as individual symptoms, were sporadic and minor - enough that at any given time I couldn't just point to "disease x" and lay my problems on it, so compounding the physical issue was a real fear that I was simply a lazy hypochondriac. The doctor's immediate concern and ability to quickly point out, even to me as a lay person, the structural problems in my sinsuses was therefore a huge relief.

I had my tonsils out, adenoids out, turbids cut down, septum reshaped, and my soft palate trimmed and shaped in a 2.5 hour procedure.

There are still stints and packing in my nose so it's a little soon to be certain but I can already feel better airflow and am already getting better sleep.

The sensation of full airflow most people take for granted is almost narcotic to me - for the last few days lying around recovering I've just been sitting, blinking and goggling at how alert I feel and how much more responsive my body seems fully supplied with good ol' o2

Dispite the pain and expense, I know this was the right choice for my fight career and my daily life.

The only downside is I am feeling a new fear of breaking my nose - previously I didn't care, since the thing didn't work anyway.

So I showed up for a lunchhour judo class and nobody else was there.

Which means, basically, I get a private for the monthly rate.

This is a very handy thing. Obviously, you have the attention of the instructor, and you set the pace...but more importantly, you get to do two things: Find bad habits and tailor material individually.

These are both kind of big deals for me. I'm a pretty big freakin' guy, and not everything developed by small Japanese men works exactly as planned for me.

The lesson went well, the pace was better for me then the usual MMA class, where I don't usually get in a full complement of drills...

Return

So I went back to the gym on tuesday.

I sucked it up. Still had some fluid in the lungs, had to duck out early, hack it up in the bathroom, then slink home feeling defeated.

That's probably a TMI but welcome to my pretty world.

Yesterday I couldn't get to the gym until halfway through the workout, so I ended up just doing some light weights and some roadwork.

Blah.