Had a post-surgery follow-up today. I expected debridement and a general recap of how the surgery went.
The debridement went as it always does. One “chunk” of crusting was too big to remove, so he tried to break it up, which hurt like a motherfucker. He finally pushed it down/back, so I’ll either cough it up (and doesn’t that sound fun) or the daily irrigation will soften/break it up. Definitely hoping for the latter.
What I didn’t expect was to be told George had returned. Yep, the more insidious of thw two, good old inverted papilloma, had returned. It had been lurking behind and under Bjorn — the everted/exophytic papilloma — so it went undetected until the routine post-surgery biopsy was done. Most of what had grown out from the septum was actually inverted, which is highly unusual: exophytic is the one that usually grows outward from the sinus; inverted generally arises from the later wall of a sinus. George apparently decided to change thing up.
Neither I nor Dr F had expected this. When he’d seen the exophytic growth — which had been biopsied and confirmed as exo, not inv — he’d not been in a huge hurry to remove it because it doesn’t become malignant as inverted does — but now, as he says, “if I see it, I’m going to take it.”
This also means the “Whoo, inverted free for a full year!” thing is gone. There’s no way to tell when it came back, but it was definitely before the surgery (obviously). We’ve known about the exophytic growth since February 2011, so, who knows — it could have been there as far back as that.
So now my 50/50 is more like 70/30. It’s going to come back. It’s just a waiting game.
Everted I didn’t fear: it’s benign, grows outward, no malignant transformation. But inverted… inverted scares me. And now it looks like I’ll never be free of it.
I know many other people have it far, far worse than I do, but still, fuck this.
