Happy New Year! You Will Never Be Drunk Again...

Warning: this post is a little graphic, and entirely self-centered. Read on at your own risk.

Many of you know that I've been dealing with a fairly constantly stuffed-up nose for many, many years now. The clinical term for this is 'chronic sinusitis'.

It's a weird world to live in, where you blithely go through your day, ignorant of most of the smells around you, until all of a sudden something shifts inside your nose, and for 2 or 3 minutes, there's a whole new world of smells revealed. Then, just like that, it's gone again, for a few minutes or a few weeks, you never really know. I'm also very prone to fairly severe sinus infections, which is just a not-fun thing to have to go through every single year.

I've been seeing an ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) specialist for several years, and she said that I have nasal polyps, basically big lumps growing inside my nose, which restrict the nasal passages. They can be reduced through a 'burst' of oral steroids (basically, taking a large amount of prednazone at once, then slowly reducing the dose day-by-day to prevent rebound symptoms. In some cases, they can actually be kept away through daily application of nasal steroids.

Now, I would think that putting a bunch of steroids in your nose would just make the polyps larger, and angrier. Kind of like Barry Bonds polyps, only without all the 30/30 seasons. But, that's just me. Doc says it's good, so I'm willing to give it a shot.

Anyhow, in my case, the steroids alone have not been enough to keep them away. There are also surgical methods - basically, they go in and cut the polyps out. My doctor has been recommending that we try a round of surgery, and see what happens.

For a variety of reasons which are too arcane to go into here, I had to change ENT's. I had my first appointment with the new doc today, and I'm mostly gratified that he doesn't think surgery is the right answer for me - to go through all that pain and such for a course of action that only has a so-so chance of permanently helping doesn't sound so fun to me.

However, I'm pretty sure that his proposed solution is even worse. Apparently, many people with polyps have a sensitivity to salicylates, a family of chemicals of which aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, is the most famous.

So, as something to try, he suggested a salicylate-restricted diet. Which doesn't sound so bad. No aspirin, but I never take aspirin anyway, so what's the big deal, right?

Oh, not so fast. Check out this list of restricted foods on the low-salicylate diet. In particular, look at the restricted beverages:

• Beer, birch beer, and root beer
• Bubbly drinks (like soda pop or sparkling water)
• Distilled drinks (like whiskey, vodka, bourbon, or gin
• Tea
• Wine

Yes, that's right. No beer. No wine. No distilled beverages (according to a separate sheet I got, vodka is still okay.) No soda (although, again, the separate sheet said 7-Up is apparently fine?)

Yeah, this isn't going to be so much fun. I know that if this does work, and we get back to the 'reintroducing foods to see if they make a difference' phase, beer is sure as shit going to be the first thing we try out. I have about 48 bottles of freshly-bottled homebrew coffee stout sitting in my living room, crying out to be drunk.

So, tonight, a veritable bacchanlia of restricted foods. Then, tomorrow, we give this craziness a try.

So, Happy New Year to me, right?