When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #25

Story #25 - I had to have my tonsils out. My throat hurt!

Do you like being sick? It isn’t very much fun is it? You can’t play with friends or even go outside to play!

My brother Douglas and I had a lot of sore throats. I can remember having the mumps and that was not fun! I only had them on one side, and I can’t remember which side. I do remember not feeling great and my throat hurting. When I was little they did not have a vaccine for mumps. I also got other sore throats. I had huge tonsils. I had trouble swallowing food. I had to take small bites. If I took a big bite and did not chew thoroughly, I would choke on the food. It’s scary to be choking and not be able to breathe!

Douglas got strep throat a lot. He even had white puss on his tonsils. When I got a sore throat my tonsils would swell even bigger. They looked like a pair of marbles sitting at the back of my throat. Every winter you could count on Douglas and I being sick with sore throats. Well I was almost 13 years old and Douglas was 16. Doctor Klump, our family doctor in Tularosa, New Mexico, told my mom that ‘our tonsils had to come out!’ He would take out our adenoids and our tonsils. I can remember being sooo excited! I had never been to the hospital before. My brother wasn’t so excited. My mom took both of us to Ruidoso, about 40 minutes away. The hospital was really small. We stayed over night. I had a little red case, oblong shaped, with chrome trim. I packed my favorite things in it. I also took a teddy bear, my panda. I named him 'Snookie.' I couldn’t take my other teddy bear named 'Cookie'; he was too big. There was a television program every week called ‘The Virginian.’ An actor named James Drury was ‘The Virginian.’ They called him that name because he was from Virginia. Well I was ‘in love’ with James Drury! I had a picture taken from the cover of a magazine that had the cast of ‘The Virginian’ and I put that picture in my little red case.

It was late July and so there was no school and we had to get the surgery done before school started up again. I remember being wheeled into surgery, I went first and then Doug was after me. I can remember waking up from surgery and I couldn’t talk or swallow very well and my throat really hurt! Before I had the surgery my voice was always kind of deep. I would be embarrassed when I answered the phone and the person on the other end asked if I were one of my brothers. You could say I had an annoying loud voice, talking or laughing! This doesn’t sound very nice but my brothers called me ‘Fog Horn Annie’ because my voice was so loud! I didn’t like being called that at all! Well after surgery my voice went up an octave! I had a softer and higher sounding voice. That was pretty cool! My whole family noticed the change. I have to say, ‘for the better! I no longer sounded like one of my brothers nor did they call me that awful name ‘Fog Horn Annie!’

We went home later in the afternoon. My mom was told to give us ice packs for our throat and we could eat soup, jell-o or ice cream. My brother Doug felt worse than I did. The older you are the harder to recover from that surgery. My mom had 7-up for us to drink, but nothing tasted good. Water didn’t taste good. The 7-up stung our throat from the carbonation in it. We both felt miserable! She gave us Bayer aspirin for the pain, but it didn’t help much. She made jell-o and gave us some and it was okay. She gave us ice cream but that didn’t taste good and it make our throats feel yucky. We were spitting out blood and ice cream being a milk product combined with blood, the ice cream tasted awful! Then she gave us pudding and that didn’t taste good either for the same reason the ice cream didn’t taste good. My mom told both Douglas and I we were being picky and not very grateful. She spent food budget money on treats for us to make us comfortable and we didn’t show any appreciation. Well, we were sorry but our throats hurt too much and nothing tasted good. She finally ended up just giving us Chicken Noodle Soup. That tasted good. We did get to have Popsicles and they were good and it made our throats feel better.

I was up and around in 3 days but my brother Doug was down for a week! He was not feeling good at all. It took him over a week to be up and about again. Both of us were so much healthier after our tonsils were gone. We rarely got sick with sore throats after surgery. We didn’t miss as much school during the winter months like we used to. It was so great not to be sick every single winter! I remember the best part of having my tonsils out; one-I wasn’t sick hardly at all anymore in the winter; two-my voice was higher and softer and I wasn’t called ‘Fog Hog Annie’ anymore!

When my daughter Lisa was 3 years old she had her tonsils and adenoids removed. She had very big tonsils just like her mom, me! We had to be very careful if we left her with anyone to baby sit. We told the babysitter to be careful when Lisa ate so she wouldn’t choke. It made people so nervous that they would never let her eat anything. She could drink whatever she liked, but they did not let her eat. She was always hungry when we got back.

We were visiting my parents in New Mexico and Lisa choked on a lemon drop. She wasn’t allowed to have hard candy but somehow she snuck one from the candy dish and the next thing we knew she was chocking. It got caught in her throat and she started choking. Her face turned blue and then purple. We gave her the Heimlich maneuver and it did not help. We had her bend over and slapped the middle of her back and that didn’t work. We gave her warm water to drink and that didn’t work. This all happened in less than half a minute. She was still purple and couldn’t breathe. Her dad, your grandpa, turned her upside down and ‘shook her’ and then turned her right side up. I put my index finger in her mouth and felt the lemon drop. It was trapped behind her right tonsil. I hooked my finger around it and ‘yanked it out!’ The lemon drop scratched her throat and she spit up a little bit of blood. She gasped for air and could breathe again. What a relief! That scared us to death! What I should have done when Neil shook her upside down, while she was still upside down that’s when I should have checked her throat and then pulled the lemon drop out. By having her right side up again the lemon drop could have slid back down her throat again. When we got back to Oregon (we lived in Redland, Oregon about 8 minutes from Oregon City) we made an appointment and she had her tonsils out! No more choking! Her doctor told us that the lemon drop probably was down to her larynx and was blocking the air passage to her lungs. He said if we had not got the lemon drop out she would have had to have a tracheotomy or she would have died from not breathing. That’s where you cut a vertical slit on the outside of the hollow of the throat in your neck. I’m so glad we didn’t have to do that!