My ENT must need a new pair of shoes...

So, if you know me, you know that I have really bad nosebleeds. It’s disgusting. I feel really bad for my roommate.

About two weeks ago, my doctor finally had the brilliant idea that something *might* be wrong.
So he sent me to an ENT (ear, nose and throat specialist).
It was not fun.

First of all, the ENT does not have her own office. No, she works at the Springfield Clinic, which is basically a large building that smells like Lysol. And not the pleasant lemony kind of Lysol—the weird antiseptic-smelling kind.

So, on Good Friday, I went to the ENT. What I hate most about going to the doctor is that your appointment is never really on time. If they say 10:30, you might as well not even show up until 11:15. But my freakishly organized mother insisted on getting there at 10:15. So I got to wait a full *hour* in the waiting room with children who had shoved rubber balls up their noses, old men whose ears were leaking crap, etc. It was not a pleasant experience.
Then, when the nurse finally called me back to the office, the ENT came in.

“So, you’re having nosebleeds.” She said.
Duh.
Then, after several minutes of mindless, faux-polite Q & A, she said the one thing I didn’t want to hear. “We’re going to have to cauterize it.”

Um…thanks, but no thanks.

First of all, have you ever been in an ENT’s office? It’s a creepy place. There’s this big chair in the middle of the room that looks like some sort of death chair or something. And there’s a big cord hanging from the ceiling. I didn’t know what that was for. The creepiest thing is that all of the doctor’s tools are just sitting out, on this big cabinet. They are really sharp, and some of them look like blowtorches. There’s this big machine that I don’t even want to *think* about.

Needless to say, I wanted to get out of there. But the ENT had other ideas. She took this big headband thing with a light on it, which she plugged into the cord hanging from the ceiling.

She looked like she was going to go spelunking in my nose.

Luckily, my mom happened to mention that we were getting on a plane for San Antonio the next morning. So the ENT decided it would be best to wait a week, after we got back, to cauterize it.
So a week later, yesterday, I went back to the ENT’s office, absolutely dreading it. Cauterization = not fun, from what I could tell. Basically, the doctor sticks a match up your nose, except it has silver nitrate on it. Yeah.

So we got back in the little room again (which looked even more like a death chamber the second time around) and the ENT came in. She put on her spelunking headdress and looked in my nose. Her breath smelled like lemon Starbursts. I kind of wanted to run away.

“Well,” she said, “it looks a little better today. I think we’ll wait about a month or so and see how you do, and then we’ll cauterize it.”
Um…are you kidding me?!

Seriously, lady, if you’re going to put me through excruciating pain, just get it over with! So now, instead of just paying her for one office visit, we get to pay for three!

I mean, hey, it’s not like I want to get the inside of my nose burned, but this is getting ridiculous.

Long story short, my nose is still bleeding. And I have to go back to the ENT...