3 days, 5 doctors

Every once in a while I have to check out for a few days and check in with my doctors.  You know the saying, You have to put yourself first and take care of yourself if you want to take care of others.  Well, I have a hard time following that sometimes.  Today was the week, I needed to just go to all my doctors and make sure I'm healthy and up to par for a 31 year old.

Scott had to take some time off and work from home so I could get to all of my appointments.

One of the places I went to was my ENT doctor in NYC.  I wanted to see him because of my lingering laryngitis I had gotten at the beginning of the year.  It's been weeks and I haven't quite felt 100% in my nose/mouth/throat area even after taking an antibiotic.  Because I was on an antibiotic, I had to push back my infusion by 2 weeks which could lead to me having a flare up or symptoms of my Crohn's.  So antibiotics = good for an infection = bad for me if it interferes with my infusion.

Anytime I get an infection I have to take extra precautions because of my already weakened immune system due to my Crohn's disease and the drugs I am on to control my Crohn's.  So, I just wanted to make sure there was nothing obstructing my passage ways.  The doc. confirmed with an endoscopy that I was fine and probably just needed another week or two.

However during my discussions with him, he identified another issue that I was having (although didn't even think of it at the time) and sent me over immediately to get a CT scan done.

He called me back to NYC 1.5 days later to go over the results with me and this is what we discovered.

The above picture is from the CT Scan they took.  Ideally this image if you folded it in half vertically, would be a mirror image of each other.  Clearly, they are not.  The two pockets under my eye sockets are my sinuses.  The sinus on the right (the big black blob) is clear.  My sinus on the left (the gray area) is not draining.  This shows that I've had chronic sinusitis for probably years.  It's never gone away because my body is not strong enough to fight it off because of my Remicade infusions every 8 weeks.

The doctor can't tell exactly what is going on with a scope because my sinus is full of something.  It could be an infection, it could be a polyp or some other kind of growth preventing my sinus from draining.  Over time, this could potentially cause vision problems or even migrate to your brain.  Yikes!  So, this is something that needs to be dealt with and dealt with timely for me because of the medicine I am on for my Crohn's and because we don't want to act in an emergency situation.

I have two options:
Option 1:  Get put on a pretty severe and heavy duty antibiotic for 2 weeks and hope that it clears the infection, if there is an infection there.  The risk is that this antibiotic will wipe out all the good bacteria that is in my body.  If this happens I could develop C Diff which could completely flare up my Crohn's that is currently under control.  C Diff happens when the good bacteria is wiped out  and creates a blank slate for any bad bacteria to filter into and take over.  There is a chance that I'd be "put through hell" as the doctor referred to for nothing.

Option 2:  Get sinus surgery.  Risk: Working in close proximity to eye and brain which could be damaged. But I won't have to be on antibiotics and we'd know exactly what is causing this blockage.

After discussing with Scott and my parents we are going the surgery way.  Which means that in less than 3 weeks I'll be sedated and under the knife and will need to spend 2 weeks at the very least recovering.  We have to act fast because this could potentially turn into something more serious and I need to get the surgery and have ample recovery time before my next Remicade treatment which is in 8 weeks.

So instead of spending Spring Break with the kids in February, we had plans on taking them to an indoor water park in CT, they will be at my parents home and I'll be recovering in my bed.