Breath by James Nestor EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: James Nestor
- ISBN: 0735213615
- Language: English
- Genre: Anatomy Science
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Page: 304
- Price: Free
THE WORST BREATHERS IN THE
ANIMAL KINGDOM
The patient arrived, pale and torpid, at 9:32 a.m. Male,
middle-aged, 175 pounds. Talkative and friendly but visibly
anxious. Pain: none. Fatigue: a little. Level of anxiety:
moderate. Fears about progression and future symptoms:
high.
Patient reported that he was raised in a modern
suburban environment, bottle-fed at six months, and
weaned onto jarred commercial foods. The lack of chewing
associated with this soft diet stunted bone development in
his dental arches and sinus cavity, leading to chronic nasal
congestion.
By age 15, patient was subsisting on even softer, highly
processed foods consisting mostly of white bread, sweetened
fruit juices, canned vegetables, Steak-umms, Velveeta
sandwiches, microwave taquitos, Hostess Sno Balls, and
Reggie! bars. His mouth had become so underdeveloped it
could not accommodate 32 permanent teeth; incisors and
canines grew in crooked, requiring extractions, braces,
retainers, and headgear to straighten. Three years of
orthodontics made his small mouth even smaller, so his
tongue no longer properly fit between his teeth. When he
stuck it out, which he did often, visible imprints laced its
sides, a precursor to snoring.
At 17, four impacted wisdom teeth were removed, which
further decreased the size of his mouth while increasing his
chances of developing the chronic nocturnal choking known
as sleep apnea. As he aged into his 20s and 30s, his
breathing became more labored and dysfunctional and his
airways became more obstructed. His face would continue a
vertical growth pattern that led to sagging eyes, doughy
cheeks, a sloping forehead, and a protruding nose.
This atrophied, underdeveloped mouth, throat, and skull,
unfortunately, belongs to me.
I’m lying on the examination chair in the Stanford
Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery
Center looking at myself, looking into myself. For the past
several minutes, Dr. Jayakar Nayak, a nasal and sinus
surgeon, has been gingerly coaxing an endoscope camera
through my nose. He’s gone so deep into my head that it’s
come out the other side, into my throat.
“Say eeee,” he says. Nayak has a halo of black hair, square
glasses, cushioned running shoes, and a white coat. But I’m
not looking at his clothes, or his face. I’m wearing a pair of
video goggles that are streaming a live feed of the journey
through the rolling dunes, swampy marshes, and stalactites
inside my severely damaged sinuses. I’m trying not to cough
or choke or gag as that endoscope squirms a little farther
down.
“Say eeee,” Nayak repeats. I say it and watch as the soft
tissue around my larynx, pink and fleshy and coated in
slime, opens and closes like a stop-motion Georgia O’Keeffe
flower.
This isn’t a pleasure cruise. Twenty-five sextillion
molecules (that’s 250 with 20 zeros after it) take this same
voyage 18 times a minute, 25,000 times a day. I’ve come
here to see, feel, and learn where all this air is supposed to
enter our bodies. And I’ve come to say goodbye to my nose
for the next ten days
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