Artery Imitates Lifery

Get out the maracas, everybody! It's time for a nasal angiogram!

Why, you ask, would anyone want to a silly thing like that? What kind of nut would allow a doctor to stick a tiny tube into his femoral artery and thread it all the way through his major arteries and into his nose? This kind of nut, of course! Because I like it that way! Plus a real reason--bloody noses.

It all began last July, when I got an orbital cellulitis* under my right eye where I have no orbit. (See, Got the Stinkeye.) One of the major symptoms of that was nosebleeds.  While most of the infection went away, some remained in the back of my throat. From July until just a couple of months ago, I was on many different antibiotics, none of which worked for more than a week.** The infection finally cleared up a couple of months ago when I took my ENT consultant Hygeia's advice very literally and put gobs of antibiotic ointment up my nose every day. It was so much that it slipped down the back of my throat, directly attacking the site of the infection.

However, even after the infection got better, my nose kept on bleeding. And I'm not talking about a drop here and there. I'm talking about fairly exciting bleeds that sometimes might last for an hour until I had an emergency visit with a specialist to get it stopped. My nose would bleed at awkward times, like, for instance, when I was seeing a patient. I don't think I ever actually bled on a patient, but I was close a few times.***

This was made worse by the anti-platelet medication (kind of like a blood-thinner) that I take to prevent another stroke.**** This medication (Aggrenox) prevents strokes by making harder for blood to clot. Unfortunately, it also makes it easier to bleed. So, I have been going without Aggrenox for months. This is not a viable long term option. Strokes suck, even minor ones I like I have had, and the next one might not be so minor.

So, a few months ago, Hygeia suggested that I get this insane procedure to stop the bleeds. I procrastinated until I told Kathleen about it, which meant that it would actually get done.

The first part of this starts 6 hours from now. In the morning, this very specialized specialist will poke that a tube into my femoral artery, thread it through the major arteries all the way to the blood supply to my nose. He will then inject dye which will be visible by x-ray and allow him to make a map of the microscopic details of my blood vessels.

Some time in the next few weeks, after he has figured out the source of the bleeds, he'll do another angiogram (to me; unfortunately, I can't foist this on anyone else) and block the tiny blood vessels that are causing the nosebleeds with the equivalent of superglue. That has to be the hardest way anyone has every come up with just to sniff glue.












* which has nothing at all to do with planetary motion or unsightly lumps of fat around the thighs and buttocks. The orbit refers to the bone of the eye socket. Cellulitis is an infection just under the surface of the skin. An orbital cellulitis can be highly dangerous. The orbit is a relatively closed space, so drainage from the infection may get cut off, increasing pressure on the eye, potentially causing blindness, and so on. Lucky for me, my right orbit isn't a closed space anymore. They took the bottom of it out in 2005 when I had the osteosarcoma. See? Every cloud has a silver lining!

** Every time you use antibiotics, you are potentially breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria. Perhaps, if all of these antibiotics create an invincible superbug in my body, they can name it after me.

*** I'm fairly blase' about nosebleeds. I have had them fairly often since my childhood nasal cancer. I even carry a little clamp in my pocket that I can put on my nose to put pressure on it so I can still use my hands. I'm told it's very attractive.

****I've had two little strokes. For those stories, see Different Strokes for Different Folks in Tumoriffic, August 14, 2006, and I'll find the other link later.