How I Got To This Point, Part One

So, one week from tomorrow, the tonsils are going, going…gone. Adenoids with them.

The real question is, how did this all get started?

As a kid, my tonsils were never problematic. I had ear infections, but those stopped right around the same time my parents quit smoking (I would have been 4 or 5). Coincidence? Probably.

Anyway, I had the requisite childhood diseases. Chicken pox, a few cases of strep, flu, colds. Nothing especially interesting. I almost always got a massive sore throat on camping trips with the Girl Scouts – probably a combination of lots of chatter and low grade allergies. Gargling with warm salt water was the “cure” – that and getting home to my own bed, my own home and my own family.
Scouting is totally exhausting!

In my high school years, I missed school infrequently, but I do remember losing my voice in Spring of my Freshman year. Again, too much strain on the vocal chords (back to back productions in Chorus and Drama) combined with the pollen and general fatigue.

College is where I think the problems really started.

In October of my Freshman year, I contracted a very mild case of mono. It wasn’t much more than being really tired all the time and feeling rundown. Once again, I attribute this to having a very active summer – working 10 hours a day as a cashier, then going home, getting cleaned up and going out with my friends. I was in a strange environment, under stress, eating poorly and not getting enough sleep. Within a few weeks my mono was gone.

From that point on, I ended up getting really sick every Fall Quarter – usually right around finals. It would be a total upper respiratory jamboree of stuff – ear infections, sinus infections, strep, tonsillitis and so on. My junior year was the worst of the lot – I had all of them at once. They didn’t stop me completely, only because it was finals, I usually had a concert with Glee Club that accounted for my entire grade for the Quarter, and even if I showed up and feverishly mouthed words (see Junior year), that was an automatic A. Anything less would result in an F. No thanks.

Whenever I got sick, I’d head over to Student Health, where for about $3 I’d get Amoxicillin and Guiafed which would stomp out whatever nasties were living in my head and throat. I’d also almost inevitably get tested for Chlamydia, because I believe UGA had a grant to perform as many tests for that as they could. Good news kids, I never had Chlamydia. Which, when you’re not having sex with random strangers (or at all) tends to be the case. Basically, what I am saying here is that Student Health isn’t interested in long-term solutions – they want to give you your drugs and get you out of there so that they can focus on getting grants for more STD testing.

Anyway – that’s when I first started to carry a nearly continuous sore throat. I attribute a lot of that to my situation. For most of college, I lived in a Sorority House, and group living is akin to being in a large petri dish. The house wasn’t conducive to normal sleep – that is to say, I had classes every quarter at 7:50 AM. Most of my housemates were late risers, meaning they could be up at 3AM because they weren’t in class until noon. I would stick my head out of the door of my room and scold when someone ran by shrieking at 2:20 AM – and for that, I garnered (fairly, as it happens) the reputation for being somewhat of a bitch.

Also, when you share bathrooms, dining facilities and common areas with 55 other people, some level of illness is just inevitable.

So, I eventually got the hell out of college and entered the workforce. There, I remained reasonably healthy. I would get the stomach flu every now and again, and in my mid-twenties, I picked up a flu that put me out of work for three days – which for me was incredibly rare. In fact, I have not since taken more than a single day off, and even then, we’re talking about stomach flu.

It was in my mid-twenties that the tonsiliths started. It began as a feeling that I had something stuck in my throat – the feeling you’d get if you swallowed a pill sans water and it got caught. Within a week of getting that feeling, I’d get a white lump on my tonsil roughly the size and consistency of a grain of rice, and I could usually either cough it out or dislodge it with a Q-Tip. They smelled terrible, but they weren’t frequent, so I didn’t think much of it.

By my early 30s, they were getting more and more frequent – almost constant. I still didn’t know what they were, so one day I Googled “feels like pebble stuck in throat” and learned that I wasn’t alone, and they were called either tonsil stones or tonsiliths. Half the sites were trying to sell me snake oil to get rid of them, and the other half were accounts from people like me – constant sore throat, constant stones, bad smell, etc.

I basically put up with the stones, occasionally threatened to get an appointment with an ENT, and lived my life.

And then, last month I got a sign that maybe I should do something.


Stay Tuned for Part 2. Coming soon to a blog near you.