Forty one years ago, when I was eight ears old, I got into a fight. I started calling some older (and bigger) boys a bunch of names, and they didn’t like that. One of their number got the jump on me and, smack, I took one right in the kisser. A big fat fist the size of a cantaloupe right in the face. My friends, who had, until then, stood at my back, ran and left me to fend for myself. Several kicks later, I managed to get away from the gang of boys (The Little Lamp Agro Boys!) and limped home alone, nursing my wounded face and my wounded pride along the way. I told my mother that I’d walked into a lamp post, an excuse she found plausible given I was famous/infamous for my clumsiness. A couple of days later, by way of the Mom’s network, my Mum discovered the real reason why I was sporting a large and impressive black eye. And she wasn’t pleased. Actually, she was royally pissed, as was my father. After that episode, I was, essentially, grounded for the next ten years.
Skip forward seven years to secondary school, Rutherford Comprehensive School to be specific. My nose is now bent quite badly out of shape and my father suspects that it will get worse as I grow older. Father was an ex-army man and, in his younger days, had been a boxer for his regiment. He was therefore no stranger to sports-related injuries. Indeed, for most of his army career he was known as ‘Camel Nose’, which was actually a fairly accurate description of his proboscis. Following one particularly energetic bout, he was left with a seriously smashed beak, which required the immediate attention of the camp’s Doctor. Short on equipment and facilities, the MO’s solution was, with hindsight, quite ingenious really. With the aid of two suitably burly medical orderly’s, he proceeded to jam my father’s busted conk in the hinges of his office door… and then slowly began to close the door. ‘This might hurt a bit’ he told my father. No kidding. This treatment fixed the immediate problem but my father’s nose was smashed almost certainly beyond repair.
That was 1948. Skip forward to 1975. Medicine and rhinoplasty have moved on.
At the tender age of 14, I had my first nose job. I don’t remember much except that I puked a great deal and it hurt. A lot. However, the procedure (a basic septoplasty) was not a success, firstly because the surgeon under-estimated the damage to the cartilage and, secondly, due to the efforts of one of my school mates, one Sukhdev Bogan. Bogan took a particularly sadistic delight in pulling, tweaking and punching my fragile nose at every available opportunity. On one occasion, Bogan grabbed my nose and turned it a full 90 degrees to the left. He thought that this was enormously amusing, as did his friends. For me, the result was a very loud, very angry scream of agony as the still-fragile septum detached itself from the bone. This was immediately followed by a pool of blood which puddled at my feet outside of our form room. Bogan, sensing that he was not going to get away with this assault, ran for his life and later denied any part in the action, claiming that he’d been somewhere else entirely. My form teacher was unconvinced, and Bogan found himself on Detention. Again.
I didn’t dare tell my father what had happened. He’d paid for my operation out of his own pocket and it had cost him a big fat wad of cash. I knew what his reaction would be if he found out that Bogan, a borderline sociopath, had wasted all that cash.
(If you’re wondering what happened to Bogan then that’s another story entirely. The last I heard of him, he’d been sentenced to five years in a French prison for passing dud cheques.)
Skip forward in time another thirty five years. It’s Winter 2009 and, thus far, I’ve endured an unknown number of injuries to my nose. Thankfully, few have come from any kind of pugilism, and the vast majority stem from playful head-butts received from various dogs over the years. My septum, that lump of cartilage that separates the two halves of your nose, is now badly bent out of shape with the result is that my nose whistles when it gets cold, and not necessarily in tune either. I can hardly breath through my right nostril and my left is big enough to jam your fist in. Both nostrils block easily, especially so if I get a head cold. The only way to clear a persistent and difficult blockage is manually. It’s not nice and it’s not pretty.
Last winter, I went through hell. A head cold combined with a small but painful injury to the septum itself meant that breathing was agony and sleeping impossible for about a month. I resolved to have something done about my busted nose and, as soon as the spring arrived, I went to see my GP. He referred me to a consultant at the Freemen Hospital in Newcastle, who then agreed that there was a problem and that the could help. He also offered to reduce the size of my nose so that it was more in proportion with the rest of my face, and also to remove the obvious break in the bridge which gave it the characteristic hook.
The surgery took place three weeks ago. I spent the first two weeks with a plaster bandage covering about a third of my face. That remained in place until I had a bad reaction from the bandages and it had to come off. Since then, I’ve been sporting a plastic shield which protects the delicate bridge/septum join, which I’ve been told will remain fragile for the next six months. Absolutely no contact sports until summer 2011. Fine by me.
My new nose isn’t comfortable yet and is still very, very sensitive to physical contact, especially if I snag it when changing clothes, but it is healing. The plastic shield will come off on Wednesday though I’ll still need to be wary of any injury for another five months.
That said, my new nose looks good and doesn’t dominate my face the way it used to. I can also breath again, after a fashion. It isn’t perfect yet because the tissue is still swollen from the operation and so periods of good air flow don’t last long. However, they do promise a slightly easier future.
One of the joys is that my ears are also clear for the first time in many months. The delicate tubes that link the ear, nose and throat have been fixed. Balance has been restored and they’re comfortable again.
This has led to some interesting observations. I can now hear mixes properly again, and some of my own recent efforts do indicate that my hearing has been failing, or at least out of balance for the last year.
Hence, I’m now back in the studio teaching my ears to mix properly. It’s about getting my ears used to the sound of the studio and how good it can sound when everything is working properly. The good news is that this involves a lot of listening to CDs, including lots of artists that I’ve not heard in many, many moons. I’m importing most of these into iTunes at the highest possible resolution, with the output going to the main mixing desk via a 24-bit USB converter. There have been a few surprises along the way, a few discoveries - parts that I’ve not heard before, mixes that seem more alive than in previous incarnations.
A very pleasurable experience, actually.
- December 27
- , 2010
