Last edited Sun Dec 22, 2024, 09:37 PM - Edit history (1)
Interestingly enough, I never caught strep even tho we shared a bedroom all thru childhood. I first caught it when I was in my 30s because it was going around the office and my damn sick boss used the phone on my desk.
But back to my sis. She was born when I was 6 y.o. and our brother was 5 y.o. — so primary school in the 1950s. We brought home every childhood disease going around, which meant that in the first year of her life she got measles and mumps and chickenpox and rubella. She was one sick little baby. She was so tiny that at the age of two my parents took her to a pediatrician for a couple of visits, which was a big deal because our family doc was a GP who took care of the whole family for everything. The pediatrician said she was just going to be “a little hummingbird.” She was 3 when we moved away.
What she was was a really skinny little girl who was sick a lot with strep and whatever else went around. Our dad did not believe in tonsillectomies — but we moved again, and a new doc took one look at her throat and said the surgery absolutely had to be done, and so at the age of 10 it was.
She started to grow. She grew about 12 inches in a year. She was hungry all the time from growing so fast, and mom just kept feeding her probably 6 times a day, and she was still skinny.
“A little hummingbird” my butt — by the time my sis quit growing she was nearly 6 feet tall, which is 8 inches taller than I turned out to be.
I honestly don’t know what to say about the study correlating anxiety disorders and PTSD with having one’s tonsils out. Our dad didn’t approve of the procedure because he and his sibs were of a generation born just after WWI when it was commonly done as a preventative measure — so dad and his two sibs were sent to the hospital as a group to just get it over with. Anxiety disorders — don’t really know that it runs in that side of the family, though I suspect PTSD was probably present because of the time they spent in an orphanage.
Where the anxiety disorders run deep is on my mom’s side of the family, but truly they (and we in my generation) also had experiences that could account for that — and I suspect a genetic component. My sis got the whammy. But from a tonsillectomy that cleared her system of a serious, continuous infection? Pardon my skepticism, when she was so desperately sick as an infant, and repeated illnesses dragged on for years. My health has always been better than hers, starting with greater resistance to infectious diseases after childhood.
Still, compared to a study with a million people in it, I expect my family’s experiences can easily be chalked up as anecdotal.
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