I'm still alive!

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Hey there, faithful readers.  As indicated by the title, I'm still alive, though I am on a soft foods diet.  Did I get in a fight?  Did you see the other guy?  Did Chuck Norris pay me a visit? None of that. I had my tonsils out.

"Tonsils out?" you ask. Isn't that for kids?  Yes, usually... and it should have been for me as a kid, too, except it wasn't, so now I had it done as an adult.  I'm glad I could clear everything up for you. Unfortunately, having them out as an adult is supposed to be far more painful than having them out as a kid.  I say "supposed to be" because I'm not really experiencing the true wrath of tonsillectomy pain (yet?).  My little buddy Percocet is taking care of that.  It still hurts, sure, but no more than a bad bout of Strep does.  And I'm doing this to eliminate risk of future strep infections... so I can consider this my final case of Strep, and when you look at it that way, it's no big deal.

I had them out last week, on Thursday morning, which would make this now the 3rd day.  They say the 3rd day is the worst.  Here's what I've been able to do so far:

Sleep
Wake up
Go back to sleep
Take medicine
Drink water
Eat ice cream
Sleep
Nap
Rest
Read
Not speak (at least not much)
Not study

I probably should do something about that last one there.  I don't want to fall too far behind, there are exams coming up in about 2-3 weeks. But I also don't think that studying will do very much right now what with the narcotics pumping through me.  Maybe I'll switch over to tylenol for the pain, so I can study and be less dizzy.  

Doubtful, though. I kind of like the dizziness for now. Life is like a dream. Or a movie, starring pudding, baked beans, and chicken soup.

It was interesting being a patient and also being a medical student.  I knew exactly what answers to give when they asked me all my history questions.  I'm also being the consummate patient, following all the directions - drinking gallon jugs of water by the dozen, resting, running a humidifier in my room, not doing heavy exercise, and not trying to scrape off the scabs. I kind of wanted to look at my own medical chart, but I didn't end up doing that.  I think that's a good thing. I heard you can be jailed for that (Editor's note: unverified).

One more thing that didn't end up happening is that I didn't get to keep my tonsils.  I was disappointed by that - the doc said he had to send them over to Pathology. That makes enough sense, I guess. I just wish they would send me a Path report on them so I could know the full extent of their grossness.  Like, how many tonsils stones were in the right one?  That way, I could feel even more positive about all this than I already do.  But I guess I'm accomplishing that by not thinking about how far behind I am in anatomy...



Also, you can check out a more detailed account of my recovery progression at my recovery blog, tonsilblog.blogspot.com.  I will discuss in a future post why I made this blog, but it has something to do with white coat syndrome.  Your homework assignment is to try to figure out on your own why I would bother writing this account.
(Hint: There is a very easy way to do this homework assignment.)

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