My week of nothing good

There are certain procedures that are categorized as "elective surgeries." By elective, I mean totally sadistic, wholly unnecessary and completely miserable. This is exactly what "elective" means when qualified by the word "surgery."

When thinking about a change of profession, you typically go through a check list in your head as to the difference in salary, location and hours. You don't usually think about how your allergies will be with your new job. So when I decided to create a company called, "Dogs Deserve It", I failed to keep in mind that I was painfully allergic to my future clients.

When confronted by a dog that sheds, my eyes swell up, I immediately loose my sense of smell and my chest usually starts itching. This has never stopped my dog obsession, though. I have learned how to deal with it and to my boyfriend's chagrin, mastered the art of nasal irrigation. It's not pretty but it works.

I have always debated on getting sinus surgery so that I can live a more pain-free dog loving life. But I've always come up with a million reasons why it wasn't the right time.

However, after my third sinus infection of 2010, I was ready to take on the beast. When I went in to meet with my surgeon, he made the recovery sound like a week laced with lollipops and gumballs. He reassured me that the post-surgery pain killers would make the experience very tolerable and dare I say it - pleasant.

I could envision it now...four days of blissful sleep, mounds of fashion mags to read at my leisure and continuous HGTV.

It turns out that my surgeon was a liar. Not only was he lying about the recovery, but he was vastly toning down the extent of my procedure.

My pain was not numbed by pills. In fact, I threw them all up sooner than I could swallow them. My face was so swollen that it looked as though I bathed in dog dander for two straight days. What was worse, was that my boyfriend was going to see me in one day.

There was no makeup you could put on to cover up the fact that you basically looked like you just got a very expensive nose beating. I was in too much pain to cry and all of the nasal splints were damaging my ability to ever produce a semi-female sounding voice. Right now I sounded like a bad version of Barry White.

My dad upon seeing me, called me Rudolph and Cyclops. Leave it up to a man to make such astute observations.

Two days into recovery and I was hopeless. I wanted to rip my nose off my face and simultaneously go on a 25-mile run. The only thing that kept me going were my dogs. I can't even put into words exactly what it meant to have a constant companion by my side. Aside from giving my face a few weird looks, they were non-judgmental. My dogs were my normalcy and peace that I longed for.

Milo would lay on me all day, only getting up to go outside and play with his brother. I spent the next few days in suffering but I passed the time how I usually do, hanging out with dogs. I never got down a pain killer, but being around dogs definitely made my mind drift away from the pain.

Now that my face is unswollen and I can breathe again, my boyfriend asked me if I would do it all over again. It's easy to say never again but as I walk into a client's home that houses a golden retriever, I smile and think that I can hang out in here for awhile and roll around in dog hair without looking like cyclops.