Good luck with your surgery and here's hoping a speedy recovery and a significant improvement in your air conditioning system. It seems that even mild CF cases ravages the sinuses, turbinates and nasal passages.
I am a bit surprised that they're not using local nerve blocks. My first reconstruction was at CU Medical school and I was wide awake as three young doctors in training, practiced medicine. They numbed my nose with cocaine laced cotton rolls placed in the nostrils. Now I remember why they're using general anesthesia, nerve blocks are freaky if not very painful. Imagine an almost cartoon syringe with a fine long needle and a capacity of 50 cc or such. They stab the needle through the walls of the nostrils. Meaning they gingerly pointed the needle at the center of a nostril opening and moved it up the nostril to a particular spot where they anchored the tip, angled the needle and shoved it in an inch or three where they either hit or landed near the nerve to be deadened. They placed three blocks behind each nostril so a total of six plus two do-overs where they overshot the nerve. They sound horrific, your description of the planned surgery is typical. For me, I really was wide awake and chose to have everything done through my nostrils. The alternative was to go through my mouth! Yah, they would have opened by cutting the upper lip from the gum line and lifted up my nose and face. My choice was fine and the reality of having your septum chiseled out and laid on your chest is far less alarming than it sounds.
It isn't too late to run! In the words of Tom Waits, "I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me... over a full frontal lobotomy". To actually answer your question, your surgeon will have the best and most complete answers. I suspect that you're going to be mouth breathing miserable for 24-48 hours. If they pack anything, and you can find out beforehand, you'll have a day or two with packing, hence the mouth breathing. My Nephew had similar surgery about six months ago. He panics if his nose is pinched shut, even at 28. The doctor was sensitive to this fear and somehow packed his nose with a tube through the center so he could breathe.
The mucus membranes will take a week to knit and by two weeks you'll be back to semi-normal. It may take a while for the bone they remove/replace to heal. Like any broken bone, six weeks at a minimum. Actually the bone will feel odd like a ridge around where the bone is removed. Don't worry, your Neanderthal genes aren't surfacing, bones repair by overbuilding, like excess cement. Other sculpting cells will even it back to normal.
Wear sunscreen on your scars, even inside, you won't develop a contrasting scar if you do this for a couple months.
Good luck,
LL
