I finally stopped breathing through my mouth after three years

That persistent stuffiness that never really goes away

I honestly thought it was just seasonal allergies for the longest time. Every time the weather turned, my nose would pack it in. It started with just a little sniffle, but eventually, I was sleeping with my mouth open every single night. It felt like there was a physical wall inside my left nostril, and no amount of saline spray or over-the-counter decongestants could break through it. I spent about two years convincing myself that if I just kept my room humid enough, it would eventually clear up. It didn’t.

Walking into the ENT clinic in Busan

I eventually made an appointment at a clinic near Seomyeon in Busan because the constant post-nasal drip was driving me insane. The waiting area was crowded, which I guess should have been a red flag that I wasn’t the only one dealing with this. The wait time felt like an eternity, probably close to an hour, even though I had booked ahead. When I finally got in the chair, the doctor didn’t even need a minute. He pointed at the screen after a quick scan and said it was a combination of a severely deviated septum and nasal polyps. Apparently, my nose was essentially a construction site where nothing was aligned correctly, and the polyps were just setting up camp in the limited space I had left.

The reality of the procedure costs and scheduling

I was quoted somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million won for the whole procedure, depending on the extent of the sinus cleaning. It wasn’t cheap, and the thought of having someone go into my nose with tools didn’t exactly make me sleep soundly. I read about how Lula, the Brazilian president, had his nasal polyps removed years ago because of his snoring. I wasn’t worried about being president, but I was definitely tired of waking up with a throat so dry it felt like I’d swallowed sandpaper. The clinic mentioned that doing the septum correction and the polyp removal at the same time was the standard move, which made sense. Why go under anesthesia twice if you don’t have to?

The post-surgery blur and the silence

I remember coming out of anesthesia and feeling like my head was wrapped in a very tight, very heavy towel. The cotton packing they put in your nose is genuinely one of the most annoying sensations I’ve ever experienced. You can’t breathe through your nose at all, which is ironic, considering that was the entire reason I got the surgery in the first place. For about three days, I just sat in my living room, staring at the wall, waiting for the bleeding to stop and the swelling to go down. It was messy, slightly pathetic, and definitely not the ‘quick fix’ I had imagined in my head.

Why I still check my nose in the mirror every morning

It’s been about six months now. The air moves through my nose much better than it did before, but I still have this lingering habit of checking my breath. Sometimes, when the air is particularly dry, I get paranoid that the polyps are growing back. The doctor told me it’s common for these things to recur if you have chronic sinusitis, so I guess I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s not perfect—I still have days where one side feels a little tighter than the other—but at least I’m not waking up gasping for air anymore. Is it fully resolved? I don’t know. I’m just happy I can breathe without thinking about it for at least a few hours at a time.