Now that I’m fully recovered, there are a couple of things I learned from my experience getting an adult tonsillectomy with essentially no de-briefing from my doctor other than “go to the ER if you start bleeding”.  So here are some things that if you have an adult tonsillectomy like I did, you probably won’t be told:

1.  Everyone’s pain levels and recovery time are different.

When I told a lady I clean house for about my impending tonsillectomy, she told me that her sister had one in her late teens and had actually been bed ridden for about three weeks.  My bosses’ daughter had a similar experience.  And a quick Google search had me reading through any number of horror stories about how getting a tonsillectomy as an adult was an absolute pain-ridden nightmare.

Except for me it wasn’t.

I have the world’s worst immune system and I have a bad record with injury recovery, so I was definitely expecting a hellish experience.  Except I was really only in what I would count as moderate pain for about 5 days after the surgery.  After that?  Meh, not really.  I really think pain levels and recovery time are different for every person and my experience is definitely not representative of the majority of experiences.  For me, having a combined tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy was far less painful than the time my right eardrum burst or when I had H1N1 a couple years ago during the peak of the epidemic.  But for some people, an adult tonsillectomy will be incredibly painful. Continue reading →