Dear readers,
I’m going to be away for a while, since I will be checking into hospital tomorrow where I will have to undergo surgery and consecutively stay for about a week. I don’t know how long it is going to take me to get back on my feet after that, but I intend to make a very speedy recovery. And since I’m way beyond vanity, I will let you know what is wrong with me (and thus will hopefully be fixed):
It’s my nose! It’s a real underachiever in terms of oxygen supply. The lab technician at the hospital said that it had one of the worst test results she has ever seen, LOL. My asthma has been a bit severe for the major part of the year, so the nose seems to be the way to go in order to relieve my lungs. Let’s hope that the doctors are right! Since part of the surgery basically consists of chiselling chunks off my nasal bone which is way too big because I had several accidents as a child, my nose will end up looking a lot different once the swelling goes down. And coincidentally, when I first went to the hospital for a variety of tests, I was reading the autobiography by Stephen Fry, “Moab is my Washpot”, and this passage struck a nerve:
It was in the playground of Chesham Prep that I tripped and fell on my face one morning and broke my nose. At the time my nose was a cute little button – if any part of me has ever been cute – and the accident, although bloody and loud, was unremarkable in the life of a small child. Over the years however, my nose grew and grew and it became apparent by the time I was fourteen that, like its owner, it was not growing straight. From time to time through my teens and beyond I would say, ‘I must get this damned nose straightened one day …’ to which a gushing chorus would always reply, ‘Oh no, Stephen, you mustn’t … it’s so distinguished.’ There is of course nothing distinguished about a bent nose.
In my case, it was my bike’s handlebar that I flew over when I was in primary school, and several other in- and accidents in the years to follow that destroyed my extremely cute childhood nose. Unlike Mr. Fry’s nose, mine isn’t bent, at least not on the outside, because on the inside it is. Mine is just quite big – think Mr. Potato Head, sans the moustache of course. My friends all said they like my nose, and even though I was always aware of the fact that I do have a bit of an unshapely nose, it was never something that bothered me. Finding glasses that looked ok usually was a bit of a problem, but other than that I was pretty settled. And to know that things are about to change is a little, well, unsettling. It’s not like getting a new haircut that you end up not liking, where you can tell yourself that it will grow back, eventually. I am going to have to live with that nose, the shape of which I will have no influence on. Well, I might just try and fall off a bike again, or dive into the shallow end of a swimming pool, but I doubt that I would be brave enough nowadays. And I have learned to speak Dutch since, so the swimming pool incident is not likely to happen again 
Well, ta for now! I will post my Kate Moennig scans when I get back. Soon, I hope!
