You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'childhood' tag.
But they are gone now! Did I ever mention that I had a tonsillectomy when I was 16 years old? I don’t really have anything to write about today so i thought I would tell you the story of the year i had my tonsils out.
OK, well first let me tell you that the year i was 16 (grade 11) was the year my asthma started to get a lot worse. The initial incident involved me going to camp and getting a little too close to some horses. I had an asthma attack on a hike that left me breathless for weeks after. Another story for another time. That year I also a pneumonia in December that had me in the hospital.
Anyway, my tonsils. They were huge. Massive! And I had something called chronic cryptic tonsillitis, which meant my tonsils were full of little holes. Bacteria and other nasties got caught in there and then my whole throat would get infected. I was sick nearly every other week and I was chronically tired. This combined with my breathing issues meant that I was a pretty worn out girl. I was doing well in school, even though I missed a lot, but I didn’t have energy for much else.
I finally got in to see an ENT and he took one look in my throat and said he would take them out. I saw him for maybe one minute but I was just happy to know that I was going to have a way to feel better. The surgeon was pretty gruff and my mom didn’t have the best feeling about him but I wasn’t too fussed about it.
My surgery took place over spring break (what a rip off!). I got to the hospital early in the morning. I met the anesthesiologist in pre-op and he had me have a neb just for preventative measures. He was nice and on the ball and I felt pretty good about him. My last memory before conking out is of him getting an IV in the crook of my elbow and counting to three. Fast forward to approximately one hour later: I’m somewhere between dreamland and the land of the living.
I can hear a female voice calling my name, but I’m in no hurry to answer. My body feels very very heavy. I can also feel some sort of urgency inside my chest cavity, like something is very wrong, but at the same time my conscious brain is saying “meh”. I can hear that I’m absolutely gasping and sucking air, but somehow it doesn’t register with me that it is me making those noises and that this is bad. The voice that has been calling my name all that time (how much time? 30 seconds? 10 minutes?) suddenly gets harsher and barks “Danielle!”. I lazily decide that this is reason enough to wake up and my brain switches on. It’s at this very moment that I realize what is going on. I’m not breathing. I can feel it throughout my body. My head kills and that cold wave of shock races to my fingertips and toes. 2 nurses and a doctor are with me and I’m being wheeled somewhere. There’s a mask on my face, I realize. Now I start to consciously work to breathe, arcing my body on the bed. It feels terrible, and I have no idea where I am or where I’m going or how much time has passed.
I’m wheeled into surgical ICU. WTF? The nurse is on the wall phone to the day surgery unit, bla bla status asthmaticus. WOah lady! The anesthesiologist is still with me and is the one telling me what the heck is happening. He says that I stopped breathing (or failed to start breathing on my own) when they extubated me and that my asthma is currently out of control (ok, duh). I’m on continuous nebs, apparently. Oy. I’m incredibly clamped up and it’s not getting in, and I’m stuck on CPAP. HELL. My body begins to relax and I conk out again. I dunno what happened here but I woke up later.
My mama came to see me a few minutes later, and I was off ventilation and onto the paeds ward by (late) bedtime. So much for DAY SURGERY! Note: this was not the children’s hospital that I had come to know and sort-of love. At this point, I was not liking the adult hospital.
The surgeon came around in the morning and said he had never seen anything like that and that he never has problems with asthma patients. Um, sorry? I didn’t mean to? That was the last time I saw him. A nice paediatrician took over, but he didn’t let me go home that day. Or the next for that matter. My lungs were so noisy that I was sent for Xrays. No pneumonia thankfully, just post-surgical gurgle-wheezes.
Gah! All this for a tonsillectomy? Was it really worth it? On day 4 I got to go home. In the hospital, I was so sick from the asthma attack and also probably very drugged and I forgot all about my tonsils, I didn’t feel any pain while I was there. The nurses kept giving me these delicious honeydew popsicles thinking my throat must be agony. When I got home though, man was I in pain. On day 7, I finally went to see my doctor just to check in, who discovered I had massive abscesses where my tonsils used to be. Somewhere in the mix I acquired a yucky infection. Kaibosh the amoxicillin and bring out the clavulin. Unfortunately, clavulin makes me break out into a burning rash.
Again, WTF? I think that everything that could have gone wrong with this surgery did go wrong. Well, I suppose that the surgeon could have dropped a scalpel down my throat, or cut out my tongue by accident.
2 weeks later I went back to school and my energy started to come back although I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had a brick strapped to my chest. It literally took me until summer to start breathing easier.
All this can be summarized by what my MedicAlert bracelet now says:
Asthma
Caution with General Anesthetics
Allergic: Clavulin
(I personally think that “caution” is a bit of a gentle term. I would personally put “avoid at all costs!”) I hope my appendix never craps out on me or I’m screwed.
Kerri asked me if I could write about growing up with asthma. She mentions that she didn’t really go through this since she was diagnosed at 17. Thanks for the suggestion Kerri, I can think of several posts I’d like to write. I’ll start at the very beginning… a very good place to start. (Points if you recognized the shameless use of a Sound of Music quote)
I was diagnosed with asthma when I was in grade 5. I’ve asked my mom to fill in the little bits and pieces that I can’t remember. She says I was always a cougher and was the atopic type since I was very young. I was that kid who would cough for weeks and weeks after having a cold. I don’t remember it being distressing in my early childhood and my family was very used to it. I probably had mild asthma since I was very young but it was never diagnosed nor treated. My mom now says that my asthma may not be so difficult to control today if we had taken care of it when I was a lil’ gunner, what with airway scarring and the like. I hope she doesn’t feel too guilty, it’s all water under the bridge now after all.
Anyway… grade 5. It started with a cold in the late fall. I swear I coughed non-stop the whole season. I remember my exasperated teacher discreetly slipping me mint candies to try to get me to stop. As the weather got colder I really struggled to run outdoors. My lungs would burn and I would double over or crouch down to catch my breath. I was athletic and this was distressing to me. I asked my mom to please take me to the doctor because I was having trouble breathing when I tried to run.
I believe, at that initial appointment, my doctor (the same one I still see) attributed it mainly to my lingering cold, but gave me a ventolin inhaler. This helped me to feel better after exercising, but my cough was getting out of control. As winter started, I struggled to breathe every time I stepped outdoors. To the best of my recollection, that’s the first time I ever felt my chest tighten to the point where I could not take a breath in.
I asked to go back to the doctor, who sent me for pulmonary function testing this time. Apparently, my pfts showed good lung function, but the diagnosis of asthma was made because I had such huge reversibility with a bronchodilator. This is also when I got put on flovent. The flovent helped my chronic coughing, but I was still struggling with the cold dry air.
My first major asthma attack came after Christmas when I was speed skating with my class. Speed skating is done on an indoor oval ice track and obviously the indoor air must be kept cool. While I was racing with my classmates, I felt good, and it wasn’t until I stopped skating and let myself glide that I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were on fire and I couldn’t speak. My classmates were crowding around me and my teacher finally called my mom, who took me to the ER. I was treated for an asthma attack and sent home late that night. My mom says that this was the first time she ever saw me panic because of my breathing, she said I always looked to indifferent to it before that.
After this, my mom started to get serious about learning about asthma. She’s come a long way, and now she’s a bona fide asthma mom. I’m sure it takes awhile for all parents to get these things figured out, to discriminate between what is normal and what is alarming.
In any case, I struggled through the rest of that winter, and breezed through the summer that followed it. I followed this pattern for the next few years – though some were better than others – until grade 11, when my asthma underwent a colossal shift. I will write about this shift in the next few days.
