Thermostat Wars

Well, it’s furnace season already, and the gender wars are starting up again in full force. He wants the house cold enough to hang meat in, and I want to survive without seeing my breath in the living room.

Readers, grab your thermostats!

I'm like a reptile, cold all the time once the thermometer drops below 70 degrees. My internal thermostat doesn’t work very well, so I have a narrow temperature range in which I’m actually, well, comfortable. A few degrees lower and I’m reaching for socks and a sweater, and a few degrees higher and I’m flushed and fanning myself. It’s crazy.

Of course I share living quarters with a man whose thermogenic (yes, I made that up) needs are far different from mine. Just don’t tell my husband. Kidding. Of course, I’m talking about the hubster, the Center of the Universe (CoTU.)

He’s actually far more normal than I am in this regard, but ONLY in this regard.

The temp is always a problem for me; I can't seem to muster up any metabolic function at all... It's sad, really. And the CoTU doesn't get it-- he's never cold. How do couples like us end up together? Different religions are a piece of cake compared to this issue. Multiple blankets on my side of the bed, none on his. If I understand anything at all from the weather reports I’ve watched over the years, I think that where the warm front meets the cold front right in the middle of our bed, it should actually be snowing...

Remember in January when I had my deviated septum fixed? Well, before the surgery, the nurses kept offering to put warm blankets on me. I accepted each and every time, and by the time they took me into the operating room I was under so many layers that the surgeon had to bill extra time to unearth me. (Try the veal—tip your servers, I’ll be here all week.)

Today I was at the dermatologist’s office, which I decided I like better than all other doctor’s visits because it’s the only place where they don’t make you get on the freaking scale just because you came in for a check-up. Anyway, as the doctor’s assistant showed me into the exam room, she asked me if I needed anything. “A parka would be nice,” I said. She agreed that the office is pretty darn cold, but I noticed that she was in short sleeves. Bummer. I’m beginning to think it’s just me…

The other thing about furnace weather is that I’m drinking a lot more coffee. I’m not necessarily thirsty, I just use it to elevate my body temperature. It’s also very effective at keeping my hands warm. Of course with coffee beans selling at $9-$10/pound, this is going to be an expensive season. At least in the hot weather, I’m just drinking tons of cold water. Cost: pretty much $0.00/pound. We will either have to adjust the budget, or I’ll have to make it up somehow. Maybe I’ll take in ironing—that generates a pleasant heat…

So we don’t have a dog to throw on our laps for warmth, (remember the “Three-Dog Night”?) but we’ve got each other. CoTU generates enough heat to warm the tip of my nose and take the blue out of my fingernails. I’m pretty good at layering up the socks and the sweaters, and trying not to be a wimp about the cold. Now if I could just get him to hang that side of beef somewhere else…

Nostril Damages (did Nostradamus predict this, too?)

All right, all right, I’m getting to it. I thought I could get away with NOT showing you what I looked like in the aftermath of the surgery. But astute reader, Mr. Richard Fader of Paterson, New Jersey*, wrote in to ask about the gory details.


First of all, I do not have two black eyes. I think that’s what happens to patients getting a rhinoplasty, aka nose job. At least it used to, back in the day. I had only a septoplasty, which doesn’t change the way your nose looks, it just removes the obstruction from one side of the internal chamber. Presumably, now (at least after a few more weeks of healing) I will be able to breathe like a normal person. And that will be ever-so-nice.

There wasn’t even much swelling on my face—perhaps if you were looking for it (and my husband, the Center of the Universe and I were looking for it) you could see a bit of puffiness in the cheeks and nose. But frankly, if you knew me, and didn’t know I had just had surgery, you would not have noticed anything different about me. Not even the day after the event. (The day OF the surgery I had a giant gauze-pad mustache taped across my upper lip to absorb blood, and wads of packing up my nose. It was pretty darn hard not to notice that.)

So what characterized the physical change in me? After the doc removed the packing, he instructed me to lean back in the bed for 15 minutes. The CoTU, seated bedside, remarked, “Wow—look at your nostrils!” I must say, the man has no survival instincts at all.

“What?” I wanted to know. “What about my nostrils???”

I pulled out the mirror in the bed-table and looked for myself. One was a rectangle, one was a circle.

“Yikes! I guess when I asked the doctor (when the decision was first made to have the surgery) about outcomes, I neglected to mention that I didn’t want my nostrils to change appreciably. Who knew I was supposed to specify that??”

“Well, they’ll probably go back to normal,” CoTU offered. “Eventually.”

“Unbelievable… Well, there is some good news in this little development,” I said.

“There is?” (What did I tell you about his instinct for survival?)

“Yes—you are 6’ 4”. If this happened to you, everyone would see your uneven, asymmetrical, raggedy-assed nostrils 24/7. I, being 5’ 1 ½”, am protected. The only people who will see my nostrils are the grandkids, and we can use this to teach ‘alike and different’.”

Here is an actual photograph of me in the recovery room after the surgery. Okay, it’s not an actual photograph, I just said that because you will think that with my drawing skills my full-time job is as a graphic artist. I know. I’m that good. Anyway, I wanted you to see how awful I looked with the oxygen mask across my nose and mouth. The starfish-y looking thing on top of it all is the very official blue vinyl glove they filled with crushed ice to serve as my hospital-issue ice pack. Can’t wait to see what they charge my insurance company for that.




*Honk if you remember him, and his contribution to our pop culture.

The Nose Knows, Part II

Thought I was the first person in history to die on the table having a septoplasty? Not so much. The surgery, as it happens, was not bad. The recovery, on the other hand, not so good.

Actually, if I had not had an allergic reaction to the antibiotic I was given, I think I’d be feeling a whole lot better by now, but we never know, do we?

So my thanks go to a fine surgeon and a terrific O.R. and Recovery staff, and the ability of the human body to recover from the assaults we perform on it! I’m getting better, and despite my expectations to the contrary, I can clearly breathe better than I expected to five days post-op.

And since I’ve taken to pontificating on the virtues of good manners in the past, I believe this is my opportunity to address the topic as it applies to the hospital room. Thus, here comes:

Hospital Etiquette for the Hopelessly Dense Inpatient

1. When your guests come to visit, lower your voices so that I’m not overhearing your family drama. I now know who cheated on whom, how many times, and why. I’m honestly not interested, and I needed to sleep more than I needed the theater.


2. Phone calls that your son needs to make about his truck repairs could conceivably be made elsewhere. I’m just saying…


3. When you take a phone call, please mute your t.v. The soap operas to which you are apparently addicted are competing with your personal spectacle, and the plotlines of the two overlap and confuse me. I have enough trouble keeping my own life straight. Don’t inject yours into my head.


4. When you leave the room to ‘ambulate the halls’ as our dry-erase board so officially puts it, that’s also a good time to mute (or, heaven forfend!—turn off!) your t.v.


5. Thanks for sharing your theory that “You could meet someone in Vegas and get married the same day, and your chances of it working out are just as good as anyone else’s.” This may have been developed via the extensive and exhaustive study you’ve made of soap operas. I’m not sure you have the (real-life) statistics to back it up.

So, while I felt your pain, got the nurse for you (when I could), tried to help insofar as I was able, and hope you’re feeling lots better, I still feel justified in making these simple suggestions. I hope neither of us ever needs them again!

Meanwhile, may all your ailments be treated in the office, and may any future hospitalizations be conducted with a maximum of decorum and a minimum of drama.

The Nose Knows

Today I’m going under the knife, as they say, to correct my severely deviated septum. This should fix my breathing problems, after the swelling subsides and the pain ebbs. If I live that long. Whatever. (The septum is a wall inside your nose that separates the nasal passages.  In cases like mine, instead of being straight, the septum veer to one side and screws up your breathing, partially blocking air flow.) By the way, this is not to be confused with a 'nose job', and there will be no changing of my outward appearance.  Damn! 

There are lots of photos of 'septoplasty' on the web, and even lots of videos of the actual surgery, but I'll spare you.


I’m just saying, why didn’t someone fix this twenty years ago, when I was younger and healing was so much easier? Plus I would have had twenty more years of decent breathing. Breathing is not optional, I like to say. Although in this case it appears to be pretty much elective.

I’m going to see whether CoTU wants to bring his camera to the hospital and document the experience…Not the gory surgery stuff-- just the ugly swollen and bandaged me post-op.  It might make a good blog post later on. To paraphrase the great Gail Collins of the New York Times, I am not one of those people who believe everything happens for a reason, but I do believe that everything happens so I can blog about it.

Anyhoo, if I’m AWOL for a few days, I’m just wallowing in the pain. Or the drugs. Or the pain. You really won’t know which. Unless CoTU invades the blog and starts begging for a merciful end to MY suffering.

See you on the other side! --no, I’m not going to die, I mean the other side of the blogosphere. If I can find it. (And this is before the drugs.)