It all began 20 months ago. I'd noticed a nasal quality appearing in Aaron's voice - like he was talking with a stuffed-up nose. But he wasn't sick. I mentioned it to his speech therapist, and she pulled out a note she'd just written to me, saying the same thing. It was my tip-off. The tip of the iceberg. The tipping point. You get the idea.
She was the first to mention the villain in this drama: his tonsils (and their henchmen: adenoids). According to Josh, Aaron's looked big, and could be getting in his way, which could be causing untold problems. So I called our pediatrician who referred us to a local pediatric ENT.
We saw him January 2013. He seemed unimpressed by the little meddlers, so he gave us a Rx for Aaron to inhale every day for the rest of his life (or so it felt) and said come back if it didn't work. We made lame attempts to use said medication. It seemed ineffective. We moved on to other pressing matters like getting to school on time and eating three meals a day.
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| You can see those bad boys (tonsils) in the back of his mouth, where the one on his left (our right) is almost touching his uvula (the thing that sticks down in the middle). |
But while we were distracted, his tonsils were busy. Gradually, I started noticing the signs (havoc) accumulating: snoring at night (or sitting, awake), gagging on "nothing," last to bed but first to rise and then sleepy during the day, too tired to concentrate, etc. By December 2013, I was back at the same pediatric ENT to say, Is it normal that his tonsils nearly meet in the middle?
This time, he was a little more impressed. We didn't have to get them out, he said. But if we did, Aaron would probably eat better, sleep better, breathe better, talk better, learn better, and behave better. But the choice was ours.
Still, "elective surgery" is really a terrible phrase. Especially when it's referring to your 4-year-old. So we took Aaron to a popular-among-Josh's-doctor-friends pediatric ENT at Vanderbilt for a second opinion. He told me Aaron had "generous tonsils." Which made me want to say "thank you." In my world, generous is good. I want to be generous. I want Aaron to be generous. I was confused. Did I want his tonsils to be generous??
Turns out...No. But he offered one more step for confirmation: A Sleep Study. Because in science, more data is always better. Except if the data is lousy and expensive and delays the whole process by several months (= sleep study on a 4-yr-old). By February, we had clarity without the sleep study. The tonsils were the enemy; they must come out; the sooner the better. It looked like this:
Tonsillectomy PROS
1. Restful sleep (maybe for the first time in his life)
2. Improved quality of life (see above re: eating, sleeping, breathing, talking...)
3. Improved performance at school (especially sooner because it all builds on itself and we want him as ready as possible for kindergarten next year)
4. Low risk
5. Once you're about 3-4 (and can understand enough about what's happening and the importance of swallowing medicine), the surgery tends to get worse the older you are (just ask someone who got it as an adult).
Tonsillectomy CONS
1. Slight chance of complications during or after surgery
2. Oh wait, there aren't any more cons. Because our tonsils and adenoids serve no purpose past the age of 2. Whatsoever.
I talked with countless friends who'd had them removed, and while they all said it was awful, NO ONE regretted it. To a person, everyone saw immediate and lasting benefits.
This turned out to be the key point. It is temporarily awful. And permanently worthwhile. But we'll get to that tomorrow when we cover the actual event in... Generous Tonsils, Part 2.
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