So, I’ve spent my entire life thinking that I’m just not very good at breathing or smelling things? Like those are just skills I never acquired. It probably says something about my sense of self that I assumed breathing and smelling were skills and I was bad at them. But that’s for sure another story for another day.

It turns out that I hadn’t just failed to learn how to breathe. I had a pretty severely deviated septum that no one had noticed before. (Shout out my sleep doctor for noticing that I sounded congested 100% of the time.) Anyway, on July 13 I had my septum repaired. On a scale of 1-10, it sucked profoundly.

I somehow got it in my head that I would be off BJJ three weeks. That is at least in part because I WANTED to have that in my head, and didn’t really get clarification from my surgeon about when I could go back. Thankfully, a concerned friend looked it up for me.

Three months off contact sports. Minimum. If I don’t want my septum to re-deviate and to have to do this all again.

This is going to suck so much.