It started with a whistling sound in his nose

It took nearly six years and visits to 17 different doctors to figure out what was going on. In October 2017, Bradley Rhoton and his wife were carving pumpkins for Halloween when he noticed a strange whistling sound each time he inhaled through his nose. “Did you hear that?” he asked his wife.

She did. “It just came out of nowhere,” he says. Rhoton, now 43, a software marketer in Boston, went to an ear, nose and throat specialist who told him he had a deviated septum, a common condition when the cartilage and the septum – the bone partition separating the nostrils – is “off centre”.

He recommended corrective surgery , and Rhoton agreed. The doctor also suggested a second procedure at the same time, a near-total removal of a turbinate in each nostril. Turbinates are small structures – three on each side – that cleanse, warm and humidify the air when it is drawn into the nose.

But they can become inflamed and enlarged – the case with Rhoton – and doctors sometimes reduce or remove them to improve breathing when sprays and other measures are ineffective. The doctor told Rhoton that the surgery was routine and low-risk. He had no idea that instead of breathing better, the opposite would occur, prompting life-altering symptoms – constant nasal congestion, sleep disturbances , crushing fatigue and brain fog, anxiety, and weight gain.

It took nearly six years and visits to 17 doctors, some of whom told him he was imagining things, before one of them finally identified the problem and offered a solution. “My symptoms made daily life a struggle simply to function,” he says. “It’s hard to believe that it took so many doctors and so much time to figure this out.

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