My Childhood Tonsillectomy

I have it in my mind that it was a Thursday morning. I was six-years-old and my little suitcase was packed and ready. I was going into hospital to have my tonsils out.

At school there was often someone absent through tonsillitis, and I remember having it myself. The default, and permanent remedy back then was to whip the tonsils out with a simple operation. My own anatomical knowledge of what I was about to go through came via the many comics I had read. When a character roared in anger or laughed out loud, the cartoonist would sometimes draw the uvula, hanging at the back of the cavernous mouth. This is what I thought I was going to have removed.

The indifference I showed towards my forthcoming operation may have given observers the impression of a brave little soldier, but my two brothers were instrumental in assuaging any anxiety I felt about what was to come; the younger because he was coming in with me, even though he was a mere infant, and the older because he had come out unscathed from the same operation a year earlier.

I Leave for the Hospital

The arrival of the ambulance, a cream-coloured monster with dark blue windows, drew several neighbours from their houses, and I felt very important when I carried my suitcase from the front door. With my parents and brother safely aboard, we set off for the Thomas Knight Memorial Hospital, which was about two miles away. When we arrived, we were shown up a flight of stairs, then did a U-turn and took the first door on the right.

Inside the huge ward, which, if I remember rightly, held seven berths. I was allotted a bed and my brother was placed inside one of two cots. After my parents had left, I soon settled in as there were other children there of a similar age to me. An older boy, thirteen-year-old David, had a corner bed. He was quite sickly and he spent most of his time in bed, or pacing about in a brown dressing gown. Everyone else seemed quite healthy, and I quickly befriended a boy called Thomas.

My parents had allowed me to choose something from a toy shop to take into hospital, and I picked out a maroon-coloured sports car from the Corgi range. Thomas had a similar car, and we played with them on the floor of the ward. The smooth lino was a perfect surface for whizzing our cars along, and we decided to have a race across the width of the floor, from the bottom of my bed to the skirting board opposite.

Kneeling together with our cars primed, and seizing the opportunity when David wasn’t walking past, we chanted in unison, “Marks. Set. GO!” We flung the racers across the floor at great speed. It was difficult to judge which car had won, however, because while Thomas’s vehicle bounced off the skirting board, my own entry veered off course and shot towards the open door. It hit the thresh and somersaulted between the vertical rails and then disappeared into the abyss of the staircase. I asked a nurse if she could please retrieve it, but she only gave a cursory glance downward and a shake of the head.

First Night in Hospital

In the evening, my brother lay contented in his cot and several of us gathered at a window to study the queue outside the Essoldo cinema, which stood directly opposite the hospital. We tried to judge which of the men would be the best fighters, and accused each other of fancying this girl or that. Both the cinema and the hospital have since been demolished.

One thing that peeved me a little was that, while we each had a jug of water and a tumbler on our bedside cabinets, most of the other patients had bottles of fruit squash, provided by their parents, which they could mix with the water. I’m sure it was just a parental oversight that I had to drink plain tap water, but I was quite vexed about it.

Eventually, we climbed into bed and the lights went out. In the darkness, my brother started crying, and this drew complaints from David. I got out of bed and lowered the side of my brother’s cot. I couldn’t soothe him, so I lifted him into my bed and talked to him. A nurse came in, saw the empty cot, had kittens, and then realised I had the missing mite in with me. Somewhat relieved, she took my brother in her arms and walked the floor until he was fast asleep. After returning him to his cot, she fired a mild rebuke towards me, and left the ward.

Morning brought a double-whammy. Firstly, it was the day of the operation and, because of that, we were given no breakfast. I have no recollection of feeling anxious about what was to come; I just went with the flow. One thing that happened that morning is that we were each given a pair of thick woollen bedsocks to wear. I have no idea why.

The Operation

Eventually a nurse started calling out names and my fellow patients were taken away one at a time at about ten-minute intervals. I told the nurse that I was hungry, and she said, “Don’t worry, you’ll have ice-cream later, and you’ll get a ride on a trolley.”

She left out the minor detail that I’d be unconscious from the anaesthetic for the duration of the trolley ride, but technically she was correct.

When my own name was called, I was led down a corridor into a small room. A bespectacled man sat at a desk studying a sheet of paper. He checked my name against his list and then gave me a small plastic tumbler containing liquid.

“Drink this,” he said. I complied, and I was told to go with the nurse. She took me along another corridor into a ward full of men, where she pulled back a curtain, and there, in the same bed, were two of my ward-mates. I climbed in and the nurse drew the curtain and left.

It was awful in that bed. To a cacophony of old men coughing and hacking, I tossed and turned in an attempt to settle. The bedsocks made me uncomfortably hot, but at least I could dangle a leg out of the side to cool down. Then the lad on the other side was taken away and the two of us who were left could move a little more freely. This freedom was short-lived though, because the next patient was soon ushered in, and it was David. He was much bigger than the two existing occupants of the bed, so he took up more room and he complained incessantly. His knees dug into my side and I felt his warm breath on my face. And with me now being in the middle, I was hotter and more uncomfortable than ever. How I cursed those bedsocks.

After what seemed like an age, my time came, and I went into a place where me and my tonsils would go our separate ways. I remember nothing of that part of my stay.

The ward was in darkness when I opened my eyes. I felt sick and went to sit up, but I expelled a small amount of vomit onto my pillow. Somewhat dazed, I shouted for the nurse. There came no reply, so I shouted again, this time stirring the slumbering David, who ordered me to bloody shut up.

Finally I heard rapid, heavy footsteps outside. The door opened and I saw the dark, featureless form of a nurse, backlit from the bulbs behind her.

“Who’s shouting?” she demanded.

“I’ve been sick,” I said.

“Well use your bed pan. That’s what it’s for,” she barked. She closed the door and in the darkness I turned my pillow over and slept.

Now, I would never say a bad word against our fabulous NHS, but I think on that occasion, the nurse’s attitude to a small boy recovering from a general anaesthetic was inappropriate. In her defence, it may be that she misheard me, thinking I said I feel sick, rather than I’ve been sick. But even if that were the case, her manner left a lot to be desired.

The sick was never mentioned in the morning. We all tucked into ice cream, and my parents came to collect my brother and me. I packed my little suitcase and we left. On the way down the stairs, I looked about frantically for my absent car, but it, like my tonsils, was gone forever.

Originally published in Medium