Since I moved here I’ve been sick with a variety of minor illnesses, but almost all of them have been somewhere in the specialty of Ear/Nose/Throat. The ENT doctor I go to here is fairly good at English, never rushes me or makes me feel like I’m a waste of time, and is an easy bike ride from my work, so when I need to see a doctor and my symptoms are the ENT variety, I head over to his practice.
Sometimes when I’ve gone with severe congestion, he’s shoved this strange stick up my nose. It always felt like maybe he was sucking the snot out of my head, but then I thought, “Eh, that’s probably my imagination. It’s probably just some camera tool, or some other weird device that helps him see inside.”
Today, though, I finally asked him what it was, and what he uses it to do inside my head. So he showed me a diagram of a person’s head and pointed to the sinus cavities. (He had already given me a nice little explanation when I went on Saturday detailing what sinuses were, what the different ones were called, and what a sinus infection is and does to other parts of you (such as your ears).)
He reiterated what he’d said about the sinus infection, that the mucus membrane around your sinus cavity excretes some sort of discharge when you’re sick, and he said that yes, he uses that strange tool as a suction device to “vacuum” (my word, not his) the excess discharge from my sinuses. Apparently it’s better for them to get “ventilated” (his word, not mine) that way.
Since I’d been wondering for quite some time if the tool really sucked the snot out of my head or not, this was actually quite a satisfying revelation for me, and I left feeling good because my curiosity had been appeased.
I’m still toting all those bags of pills, though. You win some, you lose some.
