Tonsil stone symptoms that don’t get much attention ∞
This credible-seeming article — “6 Silent Signs of Tonsil Stones You Need to Be Aware Of” — does a good job of describing symptoms I had suffered ever since my disastrous tonsil stone experience in 2015. For a year, the “stuck feeling” was savage, life-altering, until a tonsil stone was finally dislodged. And then, ever since…
- Regular “stuck” feelings? Check! Not as bad as 2015, not nearly, but it still happens often.
- Mild tonsillitis? Check! Constantly!
- Painless white patches on my tonsils? Check!
- Cough? Check!
- Ear, jaw, neck pain? Check! Sometimes really, really terrible.
- Halitosis? Not so much, and blessing counted.
But I remain ambivalent about seeking tonsilectomy, despite its potential to relieve a lot of suffering. It would probably relieve a near constant source of discomfort that sometimes surges ominously. More profoundly, it might put an end to years of malaise and fragility, because it’s plausible that my health problems boil down to my immune system being perpetually triggered by what’s going on in my stupid tonsil. But that greater prize is highly speculative. And doctors don’t like doing tonsillectomies: all three of the ear-nose-throat specialistis I saw in 2015 scoffed at the idea) And what if my systemic health and chronic pain problems have nothing to do with the tonsil? There are at least three other diagnoses that are at least equally plausible. If that cursed tonsil isn’t the source of all my troubles (just the throaty ones), then the surgery — which is notoriously painful and hard to bounce back from even when all goes well — would just be a bull in the china shop of my nervous system.
Tough choice.