RECOVERY AFTER TONSILLECTOMY IN ADULTS

i just had my tonsils AND ADENOIDS taken out on 1.4.08 and the surgery went well but after THAT the storm hit lol..i have been in alot of pain and to the person that wrote above about the "SPITTING" I HAVE HAD SO MUCH SPIT I SOAKED UP A DISH TOWEL ! I KNOW THATS SO DISGUSHTING BUT IT'S TRUE...i DON'T REALLY LIKE TO EAT POPSICLES AND ICE CREAM BECAUSE IT DOES MAKE MY THROAT MUCUSY, AND ALSO I AM ON MY 8TH DAY AND I FIND THAT COUGH DROPS REALLY SOUTHES THE THROAT ALOT BUT YOU HAVE TO KEEP EATING THEM AND ALSO LOTS OF ICE WATER IS GOOD...I STILL CANT EAT ANYTHING SOLID AND I LOST 15 POUNDS BECAUSE OF IT AND MY MEDICINE THAT IS IN LIQUID FORM ROCXICET MAKES THE PAIN GO AWAY FOR AWHILE , BUT I'M GETTING BETTER AND WHEN I GO TO SLEEP THE PAIN DOES GET WORSE BUT I TRY TO GO TO SLEEP LATE AND TAKE A CEARTIN AMOUNT SO I WONT BECOME A JUNKY AS MY MOM SAYS LOL...BUT ICE PACKS,COUGH DROPS,COLD COLD BEVERAGES MOSTLY WATER OR APPLE JUICE, AND IF YOU LIKE POPSICLES AND APPLESAUCE...AND ALSO THE PAIN REALLY GETS WORSE WHEN THE SCABS FALL OFF BUT OTHER THAN THAT THE PAIN GOES AWAY...AND THE SWALLING IS ANNOYING BECAUSE YOU REALLY CANT...

there's no way on EARTH that story is true. No way! I am on Day 7 now, puking my cauderitzed scabs up every 15 minutes and not even barely able to eat pudding, jello or even a cut-up scrambled egg since the surgery. NO Way did you go out only hours after having a tonsillectomy and have Taco Bell. Just didn't happen. If it did, you'd have been right there in the ER bleeding profusely.

Hey, do us all a big favor and speak realistically about your experiences. If you think by telling us you just went out and had some tacos that it's gonna make us all feel a lot better - guess again. Probably half the people on this site who actually are living in a world of pain just want to rip your head off! >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;) >;)

Hey everyone. Well I'm glad that almost everyone has had mostly pleasant outcomes from their surgeries. I'm here to tell about my experience that is somewhat different from most. I am a 21 year male, and I had the surgery on Jan 3 and the first couple of days of recovery went very well. Remember, drink cold water whenever you can. The constant bathroom trips are worth it because cold water helps your throat so much, it's not even funny. However, on the 5th day of my recovery I was just sitting in bed and watching TV when I noticed something trickling down my throat. I ran to the bathroom and discovered that a pretty steady stream of blood was coming out of my throat. I bled off and on for several hours which was awful because I constantly had to pull ping pong ball sized blood clots out of my throat. I also vomited up the blood that I had swallowed which made me bleed even more. After about 30 mins of bleeding at home I was taken by an ambulance to the ER where I continued to vomit blood and bleed off and on for the next few hours. To make a long story short, they operated on me again and cauterized the area where I was bleeding from but not before I lost over HALF OF MY BLOOD! So I almost died, but since that scary experience my recovery has continued to go well. I'm on day 11 and the pain in my throat is almost gone. Unfortunately I now have problems from the blood loss such as limited energy and often get very dizzy. However, I remain confident that all of this will be worth it in the end since I was getting tonsil related sicknesses every 2-3 months. Oh, and just so everyone knows, the mucus thing is common and the one thing I would stress is just the water constantly.

Hey, all. I am a 19 year old female. I had my tonsillectomy on January 3rd, so I am going into my 13th day tonsil-free.

When I went in, they told me that day 3 was going to be my worst day, and then it would get better from there. That was a lie. If they tell you the pain will be at its peak in that short amount of time, I wouldn't put too much trust in it like I did.

The first day was okay, it hurt but nothing too bad. They put me on Oxycodone with Tylenol and an antibiotic. The night of day 2 I threw up because I was taking so much pain medication and couldn't get food down. I could only have ice pops and the occasional milkshake.

The scabs starting to fall off signified the worst pain. My worst pain occured during days 5 through 8. The pain medication actually burned my throat, water burned my throat, I couldn't get down ice pops or anything at all. It was the worst pain I've ever experienced (think, your worst sore throat... multiply it by 100).

Day 9 was the turning point. I started to be able to get down real food, it still hurt, but I was still taking pain medications. (they switched me to Tylenol with Codene -- didn't burn at all!)

I had horrible earaches when my throat started to hurt the worst -- a trick I found useful was to get hot water bottles and put them to my ears. It REALLY helped. They also suggest chewing gum, but that was the last thing I wanted to do.

So as I said, I'm going into day 13 and I'm doing great. I'm finally not regretting having it done. I'm starting to eat more full meals (but still, the softer the foods, the better). I went all day today without having to take any pain medicine. Last night, I slept through the night for the first time since surgery. I'm finally getting back to normal!


My tips if you're preparing to get your tonsils taken out:
1) DRINK WATER. I know, this is so repetitive, but do it. The WORST pain I was in was due to the fact that I would not drink. Please drink a lot, and frequently. Also, drinking water reduces the risk of bleeding (I haven't bled at all). There are some negatives to drinking, such as the pain, but that eases as you drink more. So please. Drink, drink, drink. Even when you're sick of the water. You're helping yourself.

2) If you have bad ear pain, get the warm water bottles. You'll look a little weird holding water bottles to your head, but it was one of the best feelings ever when that pain went away.

3) If you're on a strong pain medicine, such as Oxycodone, and it burns your throat when you take it (when the scabs start falling off) -- call your doctor and have him or her switch your pain medicine. Getting switched to the Tylenol with Codene was a huge relief.

4) Have a glass or bottle of water handy wherever you go to sleep. You will be in pain when you wake up, and it's because of not only the lack of medicine, but moreso the lack of hydration. It'll hurt, but it'll help.

5) Find something to distract you. I watched my brother play video games and it helped pass the time and it took my focus off the pain onto something else.

6) Complain as much as you want to whoever you want. You really deserve to.

7) Don't judge your experience based on other people's. One of the worst things I did was say to myself, "Well, *this person* felt better in 7 days -- why do I feel so bad on day 7?!" You'll heal in your own time. All you need to remember is the severe pain will end! You'll be back to normal soon!

Good luck everyone! And DRINK YOUR WATER! :-)

anonymous wrote:

:D i'm 16 years old and i had my tonsilectomy on tuesday. The day right before the 4th of July. Ugh. I think I made myself more nervous the I should have been to have my tonsils out. I thought i was going to die in pain but actually, it wasn't even really that bad at all. I'm on day 5 of the healing process and on a scale of 1-10 the pain is about a 1. The highest the pain has ever been is about a 4 or 5. Now, I have white mucusy stuff trying to heal it, and its coming along just fine. Everyday i see more and more of that white stuff going away. I still can't eat REGULAR everyday food. I eat campbells soup at hand soup. lol. Cream of Broccoli and Chicken and stars. This is exactly how it goes if anyone wants to know:

Day 1: [surgery goes as follows]

you go to the out patient center in your local hospital. There they will go over your medical with you and such.

Then a nurse will take you into a patient waiting room for surgery and make you get completly naked under a johny. They ask you to get completly naked because of the germs on your clothes. They will offer you socks because the O.R is cold.

When the anestiseologist is ready, they will roll you down to them. He or she will set you up with the needle. 99.9% of the time they put the needle where the blood work is taken from. They spray your arm with a freezing numbing spray and then they stick you with the needle. In my opinion, blood work and IV's are the same thing, pain wise. The won't put the medicine in until you are in the O.R. The only thing you will receive through that IV is a water substence.

When you are in the O.R they will put a cap over your head so no loose hair gets in the way and the germs remain away. They hook your IV up to morphene or some kind of pain medication that will make you very sleepy. They will give you oxygen to maintain your breathing. In no less then 2 seconds you will fall asleep and they will begin the surgery.

After the surgery is done you will wake up in the recovery room. By your side is a nurse that will see how you are doing. In recovery there is 1 nurse to every patient. Your vision might be a little blurry due to the intake of the medication. But that gets better in about 2 minutes.

From there they will give you jello, popsicles, and possibley a ginger ale.

After the medication wares off they will send you home.

The operation is probley about 20-30 minutes long.

Your doctor, whom operated will perscribe a medicine with codine in it. Thats for the pain. She will also perscribe amoxacilin to help the healing process and prevent infection.
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My experience:

The first day, i suggest you stay home and rest. Take an ice pack to your throat and drink lots of gatorade, water, broth, ice tea. But nothing with an acid base in it. Restrain from solid food. You don't want to start bleeding. When you sleep at night. Sleep with your head elevated on two or three pillows or sleep in a reclining chair. This helps prevent swelling and pain. The first night you wont be able to sleep. You need to wake up about every 30-1 hour to drink something to keep your throat very moist. Also, take your medication as perscribed. The pain medication is very icky tasting so i suggest to have a bottle of water handy to help it go down. The first couple of days, you wont want to drink anything because it hurts. BUT DRINK AS MUCH AS YOU CAN. you're throat is going to heal and the reason they say to keep you're throat very moist is because as it heals, it scabs. You don't want to have an occurence of a thick scab. So you need to keep the scab as thin as possible. So when the scab is ready to fall off, it does so with little or no bleeding. I say remain doing all the above things for about a week.

After a week, your solid to eat normal everyday foods. You can no longer hurt nothing back there if you do. You will find that every night it gets a little better for you and you can get more and more sleep.

The older you are getting them out, the more it will hurt. But the pain for me isn't that bad at all. Resume normal activity within a week after surgery to refrain from damaging your throat.

Worst experience ever. Everyone makes it sound like a walk in the park but I'm 14 and I'm currently on day 5. My mom won't let me have my Oxycodone at night because she thinks I will get addicted so sleep is relatively nonexistent. I've had surgeries on my knee and rib and I would MUCH rather do those surgeries 8 times before I experience this. I'm currently being hydrated on only gatorade but the day before was so bad I couldn't even swallow my anti-biotic.

Really really hard to manage, I would never go through this again.

I just had my tonsils removed 4 days ago. I don't want to freak you out but yes it is quite painful! The first few days were ok. It felt like I had a sore throat so I was like ok, I can deal with this. Well, day 3 was a killer! I literally wanted to cut my neck off. It was horrible and it seemed liked nothing helped. The pain meds stoppped working, and so did the icecream and popciscles. Today is day 4 and I'm miserable. I'd rather have strep throat every month than to have to go through this. My advice is to stay on your pain meds as much as possible because sleeping was the only time I didn't feel pain. I hope it goes well and Good Luck to you.

hi, i am 15 years old and i just had my tonsils out. it will be a week tomorrow. and i to am learning to "talk". there r some words that i say and it is hard for people to understand me. and my tongue feels like its wayyy bigger than normal. and i think its because its swollen. so that might be why i talk funny. and also when i drink there r times when it goes into my nose also. also i havent really experianced the scabbing part yet so idk how that is. but i am still taking my pain meds. but trying to slowly work my way off of them. and im trying to eat more foods everyday. today i tried to eat a pork chop and had to take very small bites to eat it. and now i am experiancing, when i swollow it feels like something is stuck in my throught. but i am glad that i got my tonsils out. knowing that i wont have to deal with tonsilitis again makes me feel good:) a whole summer of that was horrible!

hey
im 18 and now on day 6 and today and yesterdays pains are by far the worst . the only medication im taking right now is paracetamol as i have bad reactions to any codeine , morphine or panadeine medications but that really has to change as i am in agony ! i had to stay in hospital overnight after my surgery as i was not coping well with the aneasthetic and threw up a few times . i wasnt allowed to leave till thursday at about 2 after proving i could keep lunch down and then on friday i went through hell where i woke up , threw up , took medication , threw it up and then continued to throw up regularly every couple of hours or less . had to get my mum to drive me to the doctors who gave me a needle and said that if i kept throwing up i would have to go back to hospital , i only threw up 3 times before it kicked in . my throat killed from continuously just throwing up stomach acid and my jaw hurt from already being pried open in surgery and then from being forced open when i was sick . now it is day 6 and whilst the pain was good for a few days , yesterday and today have seen it make a roaring come back along with ear aches , neck aches , head aches , jaw/muscle aches and a sore tongue as well as the whole throat/tonsils pain . the taste in my mouth is awefull and nothing gets rid of it . my dangly thing at the back of my throat (uvula ?) has swollen to ridiculous sizes and makes it impossible for me to speak/swallow anything properly . i manage to eat most soft foods and force down the odd bit of toast to scrape my throat so thats lucky and i DO NOT recommend creamy ice cream as it makes you flemmy and i almost choked from it . all in alll , it has so far been a miserable experience and im not sure the pros outweigh the cons just yet ...

Hiya,
I am 25 F 3 days post-op as of today all I can say is I would never do this again.I have had 3 children and labor with no pain meds and I cant get trough 2 hours wtihout my meds. I thought I was okay and talked and ate normal BIG mistake It does get worse before it gets better I am about to call my doctor to change my pain meds all i seem to notice mine arent killing the pain.. i cant eat hot food it burns my throat but i can have luke warm and not cold so ice water is out due to haveing huge holes in the back of your throat i dont see how you can gargle with ice water it just falls down yout throat anyways drink rest dont eat loose some weight it wont killl ya and take your meds!!

It has been exactly a week since i got my tonsils out.. I thought the pain was gonna be alot more painful than it acually is! The doctors told me that the fastest way for me to heal is by eating my normal diet, although painful i have been eating normally since day 1.. it hurts but i think it works.. i odnt have a hard scab on the back of my throat but it is just like muccas.. i have had no bleeding . Still a week later i am still in a little bit of pain, but its just like tonsillitus :-) i dont know how long this painis meant to stay but i can't wait for it to be over.. In the end i think it was well worth it. I had to get mine taken out because it was only one tonsil that was inflamed all the time or years and they think it may be cancer so still waiting for the test results!

anonymous wrote:

Hey everyone. Well I'm glad that almost everyone has had mostly pleasant outcomes from their surgeries. I'm here to tell about my experience that is somewhat different from most. I am a 21 year male, and I had the surgery on Jan 3 and the first couple of days of recovery went very well. Remember, drink cold water whenever you can. The constant bathroom trips are worth it because cold water helps your throat so much, it's not even funny. However, on the 5th day of my recovery I was just sitting in bed and watching TV when I noticed something trickling down my throat. I ran to the bathroom and discovered that a pretty steady stream of blood was coming out of my throat. I bled off and on for several hours which was awful because I constantly had to pull ping pong ball sized blood clots out of my throat. I also vomited up the blood that I had swallowed which made me bleed even more. After about 30 mins of bleeding at home I was taken by an ambulance to the ER where I continued to vomit blood and bleed off and on for the next few hours. To make a long story short, they operated on me again and cauterized the area where I was bleeding from but not before I lost over HALF OF MY BLOOD! So I almost died, but since that scary experience my recovery has continued to go well. I'm on day 11 and the pain in my throat is almost gone. Unfortunately I now have problems from the blood loss such as limited energy and often get very dizzy. However, I remain confident that all of this will be worth it in the end since I was getting tonsil related sicknesses every 2-3 montho I ns. Oh, and just so everyone knows, the mucus thing is common and the one thing I would stress is just the water constantly.

I had myn tonsils and adenoids taken out 8 days ago I am 48 years old i am dying I have lost 31 pounds and cannot eat anything I drink when I can i did manage to get down a small bowl of egg drop soup what am i doing wrong?[enc]

:cool:

Hello i see your post and im going to be honest and not to scare you, but i just had the surgery done november 18th and it was the worse surgery ever, im in pain, i been to the emergency room twice this week and had to go see the surgian agin, my ears hurt, swallowing cold items even hurt, ive lost alot of weight and i am starving, i really wish you the best and pray your healing is better then mine!!crystal and im 28, and ive been crying everyday like im 10 years old!

hello, im going to be very honest with you, i jusy had mine done on november 18th and its the worse surgery i have evr had in life, i have been back to the hospital twice this week and i had to go see the surgian, ive been very sick, throwing up, im starving cause i cant eat, the soup and broth makes your stomach feel hungrier and they say cold water helps well it did the first day but now it hurts to swallow also and the pain meds burn, im so sorry you have to here this, but i wish people would have been more honest with me, cause im 28 and ive been crying like a 10 year old and at night it gets worse when you go to sleep your throat gets dry and you wake up coughing in pain. i will pray your healing is better then mine! crystal