My Nose Surgery

In 1970 I had bought a new 240 Z Datzun sports car for $3600. In 1972 I was going home from work and a drunk pulled out in front of me and I hit him broadside. It totaled my Z out. I hit my nose and lip on the steering wheel. My lip swelled out big and purple further than my nose. I had a greenstick fracture in my right maxillary sinus, my ankle was all swollen and hurt. I found out 3 months later that it was broken. The top of my head and ribs were very sore from the collision. When I went to work the next morning my patients would look at me and laugh because my lip looked so bad.

I started having sinus headaches and my right eye felt like it was being pushed out. They would last about 12 hours, no matter how many aspirin I would take. Everytime I went to see a doctor about it they would say it's just Santa Cruz disease and to take nose drops. Over a period of 6 years they would increase in frequency until I was having them about 3 to 6 times a week. It was very difficult to work with these headaches. Finally Dr. Siftel, my ENT doctor decided to take an x ray of my sinus. My maxillary sinus was totally filled with infection. Antibiotics couldn't touch it so Dr Seftel set me up for sinus surgery. My dad, James F Pace, had fallen and broken his hip. He was in the hospital and was supposed to have hip surgery on the same day as my sinus surgery, April 8th. During that night he died. I postponed my surgery until after his funeral in Virden. When I went in to have my surgery, Dr. Seftel put a towel over my face. Because I had broken my nose he had to file and clip the bone out. I could hear all of this scraping. Then he had to punch into the sinus with a punch and mallet. He looked and said, "Oops, I got it into the wrong place." Then he punched another hole and got into the sinus. The infection was so thick he couldn't aspirate it out. Then he ran a little tube in to what he thought was the sinus to irrigate it. I felt like he had his thumb in my eye. He lifted up that towel and said, "Oops." again. He finally got the tube into my sinus and irrigated it out. He put about 20 yards of gauze in my nose. Then he put ice in a nibber glove and put it over my nose. While I was asleep my friend Ted Szychowski came in and took a picture of me with the glove on my nose. The operation was a success and I was so happy not to have those headaches any more. As a result of this trauma my sinus atrophied down to the size of a marble compared to the original size of a golf ball.