Sarah Hepola, BYU, Alcoholism, and Honor Code Enforcement

BYU students protest the role of honor code investigations follow the reporting of sexual assaults among the university's students.

I'm doing very little of anything other than intense studying these days. My reading material is limited essentially to content I need to review in preparation for Step 1 of the USMLE. (There. I said it again out loud, or at least wrote the name of the exam. Doing so continues to make me nervous, though I would expect that if lightning were going to strike me dead for referring so explicitly to the gatekeeper exam, I would already be six feet under.)

In any event, though  I have little time for pleasure reading, I took the time to re-read Sarah Helpola's Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. Reading the book was a most welcome diversion from reviewing the symptoms of (and i'm not exaggerating in the least) every medical condition under the sun and some that aren't.

My extended family has a bit of shared history with Ms. Hepola, a journalist who wrote and edited for, among other publications, Salon magazine. my cousin and her first-cousin-once-removed were fans of Sarah Hepola and frequently responded to her blog posts. Ms. Hepola had a fascination with all things Mormon at the time, which eventually led to a two-part interview with my cousin and her cousin. The interview may still be accessible in some long-forgotten archives somewhere on the Internet, though I wouldn't have a clue as to how to go about finding it. 

Sarah Hepola's book is probably the most excruciatingly  honest memoir I've ever read. She doesn't spare a single self-incriminating detail of her drinking exploits as far as I I can tell. She writes of taking her clothing off when drinking and of waking up in the beds of strangers following alcohol-induced blackouts.  She shares details of her very early introduction to sex at the hands [or, more literally, at the phallus] of a man far older than she.  Her life, even up to the point when she reached the age I presently am,  is one I could scarcely imagine.

I've been cautioned by a few presumably well-intentioned individuals about the evils of alcohol consumption, though I don't buy into most of what I would consider scare tactics along these lines.  I'm aware that being under the influence of alcohol can leave any person -- particularly one of my gender and size -- more vulnerable than she would otherwise be. 

Still, it will be my choice to continue to imbibe [albeit relatively moderately] on occasion. After careful consideration, I have decided that a couple of drinks in one sitting when I'm surrounded by people I have good reasons to trust will not place me in any particular peril. I haven't consumed any alcohol other than my twice-weekly half bottle of Guinness, which I detest but drink for health reasons, since my birthday nearly five months ago. I have no idea when I will again feel compelled to drink myself into  the nirvana-like state between  buzzed and wasted, though I know it will happen.

In relation to the negative press BYU is getting over enforcing its controversial honor code in relation to the reporting of sexual assault, I've certainly thought about alcohol consumption and its role in creating vulnerability.  I don't have a great deal to say about the particular issue because I don't feel that there is much more to be said about it. A person needs to have a solid handle on how much he or she can drink and still maintain control of his or her circumstances. On the other hand, it was with good reason that I chose not to attend Brigham Young University, where I would be subjected to the draconian policies of the LDS-operated institution.  Besides, BYU doesn't even have a medical school. I'd be finished with them by now even had I done my undergraduate work there.

I don't think there are many rational minds out there who would place the blame on a woman who was sexually assaulted for having consumed alcohol prior to the assault. For me, though, I don't want merely not to be blamed. If I drink, it will be to have a good time that is not spoiled by the prospect of assault of any kind.  I will always be careful where and with whom I drink, but  I could not ever take another drink for the rest of my life and still be sexually assaulted again. The last time I was assaulted, alcohol played no role.. Life offers few guarantees.

Order at Your Own Risk

I didn't cut the model's head off; STYLEWE did. Either that or the model insisted upon remaining anonymous, which wasn't a bad choice if such was her intent. 

Tonight I clicked on a link for a clothing company that calls itself "STYLEWE."  Here's the link if anyone is interested:  https://www.stylewe.com/product/embroidered-pierced-mini-dress-21184.html?gclid=CMTeppH8lswCFYiVfgodrmELXA . I don't believe the link or site is embedded with any malware content.

I would describe most of the clothing featured at this site as tawdry in an attempt to be charitable. The dress pictured here is OK -- one of the more tasteful garments I viewed at the site -- although it's not something I'd choose for myself. It's more my friend Megan's style, and her birthday is approaching. I assumed I'd probably want a small for her, as she usually wears a size 4. I clicked on the size guide to confirm that my expectations were in line with their sizing protocol. Much to my amazement, I discovered that Megan would only be able to squeeze into a size XXL. 

Seriously, on whose planet does size 4 equate with extra-extra-large?  I would not buy that dress for Megan even if I thought it would be her most prized dress of all the dresses she would own for the rest of her life. For one thing, I'd have to cut the size-indicating tag out of it to avoid hurting her feelings, and who gives someone a dress with the tag cut out? More importantly, though, I refuse to do business with a company whose size protocol is, in essence, a method of fat-shaming. 

For that matter, the company is fat-shaming even skinny people. My mom wears clothing in sizes  2 to 4 depending upon the garment and the manufacturer. She would need an extra-large (XL) size of this dress at the very least, and possibly even an XXL.  My mom is 5'3", is small-boned,  and is arguably thinner than a person should be. Granted, the company is not marketing its products to forty-nine-year-old women such as my mother, but if she were her same size and 21 years old, she'd be thin by any standard other than perhaps in comparison to starving Ethiopian refugees.

I wear size zero. Two years ago I was probably a double zero, but clothing I wanted didn't usually come in size 00, so I had to make do with over-sized clothing or with children's clothing.  It's unfortunate that I did not know about STYLEWE back in the day.  By patronizing this company, I could have worn slutty and tacky clothing every day of the week with very little effort. My Aunt Cristelle probably wishes the company had been in business when she was scouring the planet for clothing to dress me up in the Halloween that I was Trailer Trash Barbie. If she'd bought a size-00 outfit and tossed it in the dryer on "high" for twenty minutes, it might have been snug on me even then.

Incidentally. STYLEWE's sizing guide for the dress in question indicates that sizes "small" and "medium" are identical. My guess is that virtually no one orders medium when a small garment fits identically. I would probably feel better about wearing a medium for once in my life, but I acknowledge that I'm in the minority.

On top of everything else, I wouldn't think their marketing strategy would be an advantageous business model, but then, what do I know? Perhaps STYLEWE is targeting their merchandise to those on the down side of anorexia and to those suffering from the acute hyperthyroid phase of Graves' Disease or with inflammatory bowel disease.

another charming STYLEWE offering

Here's another sweet STYLEWE garment. In this one, the model (if you could see her face) looks as though she is stoned,which a person would almost  have to be in order to voluntarily wear this dress. Edited to add that I have slightly amended my position in regard to this dress. I now think the top looks like a top especially made for breastfeeding. A five-year-old could probably breastfeed discreetly under that top, not that I would ever be caught dead breastfeeding a five-year-old.

Bleeding Tonsillectomy Wounds, Third Marriages, and a Kibosh on Adult Baby Stories

Meredith tried to interest her parents in a Hello Kitty wedding but they weren't interested.

I don't have anything profound in the least to share this evening -- not that I do under normal circumstances -- but my pseudouncle told me that the Adult Babies post has begun to grate on him. He said every time he clicks on my blog to see if I've posted anything new, he sees one of the pictures of the adult babies (I think I may have taken one of the pictures down, as it was starting to creep me out as well, although I may have just had a Vicodin-enhanced dream that I took the picture down) he becomes just a little more weirded out by the pictures. He said he'll wash my car for me on his next day off if I'll either take the Adult Babies post down or post something else after it so that he doesn't see the adult babies unless he scrolls down. As my car most gravely needs to be washed, and as I'm likely to be either too weak to wash it myself or too wasted to drive legally or safely to an automated car wash, I find myself blogging at this rather odd hour.

I had to go back to the hospital yesterday to have one of my wounds cauterized. Despite my valiant efforts at keeping myself hydrated, the scabs over two areas dried up and came off, which caused bleeding that wouldn't stop. I wasn't hemorrhaging, but the bleeding was likely to continue until something was done to stop it. My surgeon cauterized all the surgical sites since I was knocked out anyway and he thought the other wounds didn't look all that terrific, either.The cauterization procedure itself didn't cause me any pain, as I was knocked out for it, but it's about as sore now as it was the first day after the surgery. This, too, shall pass, but I'm growing weary of being stoned.  I'd forgotten about this after other surgeries, but a point may be reached where one can have too much of a good thing  --  even where something so delightful as hydrocodone is concerned. I look forward to having a clear mind.

My doctor asked me to give up studying for five days. I've humored him by putting my materials away since then, and I'll stay away from them for the most part for the next three days, but  friends and relatives quizzed me using some of my pre-prepped study materials. My total study time each day  was somewhere around three hours each day, however, as opposed to my usual twelve-to-fourteen hours of studying per day. I'll need to get back to the more intense studying next week, but I can afford to take things slow for a couple more days.

The week after next,  I'll need to adjust my study schedule so that my day off is on Saturday because I must provide music for a wedding. The wedding will be an interesting one. My friend Meredith's parents are getting married for the third time. It's not just one of those sentimental renew-the-vows sorts of ceremonies, either. It will be an entirely legal wedding. Meredith's parents were first married about two years before she was born. They first divorced when she was somewhere around three. Then they each remarried others, but divorced their respective spouses and decided to give marriage to each other another whirl when Meredith was eight. This time the marriage lasted seven years before they decided to pull the curtain on it.  Meredith's dad remarried twice in the time following their more recent divorce. The first of his subsequent marriages was annulled, while the second one lasted scarcely longer than the little tulle-wrapped packets of rice handed out at the wedding reception. (Meredith's dad is so incredibly frugal that he gathered up rice packets that were not used, unwrapped and poured them into a canister, and cooked and ate the stuff until it was no more. He was eating the leftover Jordan almonds as well until he broke a tooth on one of them once the candied almonds had started to get a bit stale and even harder than usual, if it is even possible for Jordan almonds to be any harder than they usually are. Meredith said she believed  her father endured physical pain in throwing out the Jordan almonds but that, with the cost of dental implants being what it is, he could not justify risking any more teeth on them.)  Meredith's mom had a live-in boyfriend to whom she was engaged at one point, but she never actually remarried.

Meredith's parents are eccentric people.  Her mom is an accountant. While one can never  expect that every single person of any given profession will fit neatly into some sort of compartment, most accountants with whom I happen to be acquainted are sensible, practical, matter-of-fact sort of people. Megan's mother fits the prototype of an account in terms of her skill set. She has multiplication facts committed to memory all the way  to ninety-nine times ninety-nine.  Why in hell would any  person -- even an accountant --need to clog his or her brain with such dispensable data? Autistic savants and others [my dad] can calculate them so rapidly that it's almost as though they've memorized them (even I can calculate them in my head, though I need a few seconds to do so), but not Blondina. As an undergrad accounting major, she went to the trouble of painstakingly memorizing all the way through to one hundred. And she can quote tax codes in her sleep. In other ways, however, she is the very antithesis of what one would expect an accountant to be. When Meredith and I were in high school, Blondina unexpectedly inherited a decent chunk of money. I don't think even Meredith knew the total sum, but I'd guess it was somewhere around a couple hundred thousand dollars. Late one night when I was sleeping over at their home, I came downstairs from Meredith's room to get a drink of water (I don't drink bathroom water; it's one of my quirks)  to find Blondina seated at the kitchen table with an almost anguished expression on her face. I asked her if anything was wrong. She explained that she had come into a wad of money. She had narrowed how she was going to use the money down to two options: #1, she was contemplating purchasing a racehorse; #2, she was  considering putting the money away in a college account for any future grandchildren. The two options she gave would seem to be so diametrically opposing that it would be hard to accept that the same person came up with both of them. Perhaps therein lies the answer. Maybe there is more than one Blondina inside her head.

Meredith's father is named Chad. (His twin brother is named Jeremy. If you know much about the early-to-mid sixties music scene in the U.S. and Britain, you'll probably make the connection. His parents were perhaps a bit frivolous.) Chad is a psychology professor in the University of California system. (Thank God I never had the misfortune of enduring him as a professor.) He has been arrested numerous times during the annual Black Friday protests against furs (and realistic fake furs) at Union square in San Francisco. (I totally understand a person's distaste for the use of real fur in clothing, at least here in the lower forty-eight,  as down and suitable synthetic fibers can keep us about as warm as fur would.  Realistic-looking fake furs, though? That's a stretch.) Chad is a vegetarian about 97% of the time, but roughly one day out of each month, he goes on a binge and  eats practically his weight in bacon. He looks almost like a semi-starving polar bear going after his kill when he eats his bacon. Chad doesn't waste anything. He rinses, saves, and reuses saran wrap, which is  more challenging than it sounds. He doesn't use facial tissues, relying instead upon the use of cotton hankies to clean up the by-products of his chronic allergies. Meredith's mom insists on using a separate washing machine to launder her clothing and linens. I can't say that I blame her.

i do not yet know what musical selections I will play for the wedding. I don't even know what instrument I'll be asked to play. For all I know, it could be a kazoo The traditional Wagner and Mendelssohn are not out of the question, as they're going for the traditional wedding routine with the blushing bride wearing a formal white gown, the groom in a tux, and with ushers and bridesmaids and the full treatment. It would seem to be a bit excessive for a third wedding (TO EACH OTHER!!!) for a fifty-something couple, but who am I to judge? 

Will the third time be the charm for this couple, or will their rather obvious differences force them apart once again? Time alone will tell.

Her parents didn't take the bait on the zombie apocalypse wedding she proposed, either.

Adult Babies!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Why is it that I'm ALWAYS the very last person to learn about everything? I completed [and passed with flying colors] a physician training course  on mental illness. Why did I not learn about this in that course? 

What I'm concerned about not discovering or being told until an hour or so ago is the adult baby phenomenon. In case you didn't know, there are adults, possibly even living and breathing among us, who, in their spare time, dress up as and pretend to be babies. 

Isn't that the most bizarre fucking thing you've ever heard in you entire fucking life? Seriously, I may go wake up my parents as soon as I finish typing to ask them if they've ever heard of such a thing, and if they have, why they never bothered to tell me about it. 

I sent a message to Judge Alex asking him if he'd ever heard of it. I mentioned it to Knotty. She said that there are B&B facilities that cater to adult babies. They supposedly offer cribs. Are the cribs specially made, or do companies like Graco and Kolcraft make cribs for adults just like they make them for babies? Nuk pacifiers, I just learned, are made in adult sizes. 

Why stop at cribs and pacifiers? what about high chairs and strollers? I suppose a wheelchair would work as a stroller, but it wouldn't be quite the same.

I wonder what the adult babies do for diapers.  Do Pampers and Huggies make their products in adult sizes as well, or do adult babies  just buy Depends or those godawful Tena products, or do they purchase fabric by he bolt to make cloth diapers? I'm afraid that just thinking about this might give me a rash, an NOT a diaper rash, in case anyone had gotten the idea that I plan to practice this lifestyle.

Did you all know about this already?

If a certain person shows up here and announces that he or she is an adult baby, I will need electroshock therapy. I say this in all seriousness.

Just when I thought the world couldn't possibly get any weirder, it did.

Children of the Candy Corn

I may have studied for longer than I should have yesterday and last night, and am probably paying for it today. I'm not up to studying at all today, but it's OK because all of the study guides and study methods recommend studying just six days per week for Step 1 of the USMLE. For the most part I plan to take Mondays off rather than Sundays, as it's nice to have one's day off be a business day, plus I like the idea of sleeping late on Mondays. I'm not exactly sure why, as sleeping late is sleeping late no matter what day of the week it is, but somehow it just seems more decadent to do so on a Monday than on a Sunday.

Matthew and I are having company later this afternoon and this evening. A few people from school are stopping by to visit. It will be Matthew's job to entertain them. I'll come out of hibernation only to the extent that I feel up to it.

I didn't say a whole lot about this at the time, but during the last two quarters, all of us in my cohort were required to fulfill several stints of physician-shadowing. I did two here -- with my PseudoUncle Scott and with a neuro-ophthalmologist who is a close friend of the family. I did four more at school, including a 24-hour stint in the emergency room.

One of our professors was trying to warn us that what we would see to a small extent in the shadowing assignments and to a larger extent in our clerkships and internships would challenge anything  and everything we have ever come to believe about how society as a whole functions. She expressed an opinion that most of us have led relatively sheltered existences as children and adolescents and that most of us had relatively high-functioning parents, surmising that most of us would not have made it to medical school had we not had functional parents. Raptor Jesus II offered a slightly dissenting opinion when he said to the professor that I [Alexis] would have made it to medical school even if my mom had been a crack ho and my dad had been any one of 100 of her johns in months near my presumed date of conception. God, how I love that guy.

Anyway, the professor said that we would see -- particularly in the E.R. -- some examples of parenting that would make us question how our species  had survived up to this point and would give us a very dismal outlook for the future of the human race. I don't know if such has been or will be the case for everyone in the cohort, but it has certainly rung true for me.

One of the standard complaints almost everyone who works in an E.R. expresses is that a segment of our population treats the emergency room as their family physician's office. The Affordable Care Act was designed at least in part to put a stop to or at least to make a significant reduction in this practice, but I can't see that it's made much of a dent.

I shared a story in an earlier blog about a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents had her transported by ambulance to the E.R. because of what ended up being menstrual cramps, and probably not even a very serious case of cramps. She carried on as though it was a gall bladder attack or kidney stone (her mother was sure the girl was plagued with one of those two conditions) as long as any medical personnel were looking, but was sending relatives to the vending machines for snacks when she thought the nurses weren't looking. I was never quite sure what she hoped to accomplish with her E.R. visit, as she seemed a bit young to be an opium addict. Then again, one never knows.

I can't remember if I shared this incident from one of my shadowing assignments, but a grandmother brought her thirteen-year-old grandson to the E.R. because he had a small asymptomatic discoloration about the size of a Rice Krispy on one of his testicles. He'd had the discoloration for maybe three weeks according to the grandmother.  I don't know what force motivated the grandmother to all of a sudden bring the kid to the E.R. at 1:00 a.m.  on a Saturday for a 21-day-old testicular discoloration of 1.5 by 2 centimeters presenting neither pain nor even itching. I'm all for checking out testicular abnormalities, but this particular case probably could have waited until clinic hours the following Monday.

The E.R. case I witnessed personally that showed me just how directly society is going to the dogs is one you will not believe. i wish I had been allowed to videotape it, but anyone who has been to an emergency room or even to a physician's office in the past ten years or so knows all about HIPAA regulations and how medical school students cannot violate patients' privacy to film even the most unbelievable of cases even if it would serve the public to know how their tax dollars are being squandered by submoronic parents with public insurance. I'm confident  that sooner or later this particular case will end up being shown on one of those cable network real-life E.R. reenactments. Please let me know if you see it. 

Anyway,  two boys came to the E.R. via ambulance -- a four-year-old and a five-year-old -- accompanied by their mother. She had been shopping with them earlier in the day. This was in November, and  Halloween candy had been priced for clearance sale. The mother bought each of her four children his or her own bag of candy corn. The five-year-old ate his own bag of candy corn, his one-year-old sister's bag, and had started in on his two-year-old brother's bag of when he began to suffer from acute gastric distress. Meanwhile, his four-year-old brother presumably ate at least a few candy corns, but also managed to lodge one up each nostril and into each ear canal. the mother used the tweezers from an Operation board game (she did a bit of damage because she thought that as long as the Operation tweezers weren't making a buzzing noise, she wasn't actually hurting the child) to attempt to remove the candy corns from the child's ears and nostrils, but had only succeeded in lodging the candy corns even more firmly into their respective cavities. 

Instruments were used to removed the candy corns from the four-year-old's nasal cavities and ear canals. The kid predictably screamed the entire time. The mother wanted to know why something couldn't be prescribed to make the little boy feel better or at least to calm him. The doctor said, "Because he needs to know that if he sticks things up his nose and into his ears, having them removed won't be a pleasant experience." Removing the candy from the kid's nose should not  have been particularly painful (except for his nasal cavities being a bit tender from his mother rooting around inside them with the Operation tweezers), though it's not pleasant to have objects stuck up one's nose, which would have been a great reason for the kid not to have put the candy corns there in the first place. The doctor did put anesthetic drops into the kid's ears.

The physician checked out the five-year-old to ensure that his vital signs were OK, that appendicitis wasn't being overlooked, that there was no evidence of a blockage or rupture of any kind, or that such was not impending. There wasn't and it wasn't. The diagnosis was "ingestion of too much candy," for which there is an actual ICD code (WX46.887, if you're interested). She told the kid and his mother that if he eats two entire bags of candy in a single sitting, he should expect to feel lousy. The mother was insistent that her child be given something to make him feel better. The doctor said she couldn't recommend even Pepto-Bismol because it might constipate the kid, which is the last thing in the world anyone should want at that point. She said that if the condition turned into diarrhea, Pepto-Bismol would be fine, but it shouldn't be given to the child until or unless he actually experienced diarrhea. The mother wanted the E.R. physician to provide her with the Pepto-Bismol that the child might eventually need. The physician gave her a list of pharmacies with addresses. The physician told me afterward that she would have provided the pink bismuth medication to the parent except that she really didn't want it to be given to the kid if he didn't have diarrhea, and that the mother probably wouldn't go to the trouble of acquiring the medication and giving it to the little guy needlessly if she had to go to the pharmacy and pay for it herself.

If you had any doubt that your tax dollars are being wasted in our nation's emergency rooms by irresponsible parents, doubt no more. Don't blame the E.R. personnel, however. They're doing the best that they can to minimize the damage.

Surgeries, Pain Management, and Gross Surgeries Not for the Faint-of-Heart

This is what i'm looking forward to for the next couple of days once the IV comes out, which makes the idea of deriving any pleasure whatsoever from painkillers to seem like a figment of some truly twisted person's imagination.

I'm not yet ready either to run a marathon or to spend a night partying, but I'm closer to being a part of the world of the living than I have been since Tuesday morning. Opiates are still in my system and probably will continue be for a few more days, but I'm no longer bona fide stoned. I managed, under the influence or not, to get in a solid eight hours of USMLE preparation today.

Tonsillectomies used to be almost the rule rather than the exception. Among those who came of age in the early 70's or before, close to half of those who received regular medical care lost their tonsils somewhere along the way. Since then, medical attitudes have shifted. It was concluded that tonsillectomies didn't necessarily solve quite as many problems as was previously thought, and the assessment of risk versus  benefits of the procedure was looked at more carefully, especially considering current knowledge of inherent risks associated with any use of general anesthesia. Still, sometimes tonsillectomies are medically necessary.

For practical purposes, the distinction between a minor surgical procedure and a major one lies in who in undergoing the procedure. If someone else is having a tonsillectomy, I would probably consider it to be a minor procedure. If, on the other hand,  a tonsillectomy is happening to me, it's clearly a major procedure. I don't claim to be even as stoic as the average person. I do not like pain and do not go out of my way to bring it on myself.

I've undergone more surgical procedures than I'm willing to bore my readers with in this blog. My experience has led me to the conclusion that, with a few exceptions, surgeries are approximately equally painful. Obvious exceptions to this are procedures such as open-heart surgeries during which a person's sternum has to be split in order to access the heart, or even maxillary or mandibular osteotomies, in which an upper- or lower-jaw bone must be cut or fractured by a surgeon. Procedures such as these are in leagues of their own in terms of the resulting discomfort. I've also been told that a few ocular procedures -- particularly the orbital decompression, wherein a surgeon makes an incision through the inside of a person's upper lip, takes instruments through the incision to the cheek bones, drills holes in the cheek bones, takes instruments though those holes to the eye sockets, pushes the eyes out of the sockets, shaves bone from two to four walls of the eye orbit, suctions the shaved-off bone and extraneous fatty tissue through the nose, puts the eyes back, and stitches the incision in the inside of the upper lip -- are more than a bit grim. While this sounds like something that could have been dreamed up by an author of combination science-fiction-and-horror-film genres,  the procedure is for real. My mom underwent it about seventeen years ago. 

For most procedures, however, the difference in the level of discomfort is in the post-surgical pain medication that is given. Adults usually get better pain meds than kids do, which now works in my favor. In-patients are given more potent meds than out-patients are, which hasn't worked out to my advantage with this most recent procedure, as tonsillectomies are now in-and-out procedures. 

A tonsillectomy -- with or without an adenoidectomy -- is, in the grand scheme of things, objectively speaking, a minor surgical intervention.  The procedure itself is more complicated for an adult than it is for a child, though, primarily because each time a person's tonsils or adenoids are infected, more scar tissue builds up, making it more difficult for a surgeon to get to the organs to remove them. (Anesthesia, however,  is a trickier proposition for a child.) Adults suffer more than twice as many post-surgical complications from tonsillectomies as do children, primarily because of the greater difficulty in accessing the organs and because the tonsils of adults are larger (not necessarily larger in proportion to the size of a person's body, but larger nonetheless), leaving larger surface wounds upon removal. 

I'm legally and technically an adult, but my tonsils were more like those of an adolescent than of an adult. My surgeon reported that my throat was an even bigger mess of scar tissue than he had expected, but that removing it all wasn't terribly difficult. As much as it pains me to admit this, my pain hasn't been any greater than is the pain of the average person who has undergone a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy.  I did have a whole lot of nausea, but I have enough doctor relatives that I'm able to have an IV at home to prevent dehydration -- which is essential in recovery from a tonsillectomy.  

The proverbial diet for tonsillectomy recovery is ice cream. I didn't get to have any until this evening because of my nausea, but I'm now able to tolerate ice cream. If I continue to keep things down, I will have my IV removed tomorrow. I'll be very glad to lose the IV, but I will have to  deal with liquid pain medication once the IV is gone. I'm not sure how to explain my disgust for liquid pain medication other than to say that if given a choice, I would opt to eat a teaspoon of dirt from the yard outside rather than to consume the same quantity of liquid medication of any kind. Dirt from the garden, however, will do nothing to alleviate the pain from the rather large holes in my throat, so I'm stuck with the liquid medication for now.

That's all I really need to share about my tonsillectomy. People who recount their hospital stories ad nauseum are tiresome. I'll try not to be one of such people.