A collection of various experiences of adult tonsillectomy patients on their sixth day of recovery
From thousands of post comments to the forum I have assembled a sampling of various accounts and impressions of tonsillectomy recovery for each day. Below I share comments about tonsillectomy day 6. These comments are taken from tonsillectomy patients who were kind enough to share their experiences to help others as they navigate the bumpy road of tonsillectomy recovery.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 Scabs bleeding! : I can only eat popsicles. That is all.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : At 5:30am, I started to panic because I coughed a lot and when I spit up some saliva in a tissue (which I have a habit of doing to see if there is any blood); I saw a slight hue of red. RED=BLOOD! So, of course I got nervous. After drinking some water, I tasted some blood but I didn’t see anymore and I was able to swallow with a bit more ease. It wasn’t the full scab that came off, but a piece of the scab on the right side. When I woke up, I drank water and felt a burst of pain in my ear and stinging in my throat for a couple minutes. When I brushed my teeth this morning, there was a little more blood when I spit into the sink, so I’m assuming I lost a little more of the scab. I’ve been sucking on ice chips the past few days and it really feels nice on my throat. I ate applesauce and soup today with a little ease. I’ve notice my ears get worse when I eat. I was craving pizza tonight and it was sitting on the counter (my family had it for dinner), so, I decided to be a champ and try it. I was able to eat all of the toppings off of a slice of pizza minus the spicy pepperoni. Let me tell you, it was a blessing! I tried gargling with cold water and even though I refuse to look at my throat, I can tell that it feel fresher and cleaner. Good news – I was able to swallow the amoxicillin today; it feels awesome because if I had to eat another cup of jell-o and medication, I’d die! Fifth day post-op and I actually stepped foot out of my house today. Since we have a huge snow storm, I had to make sure I was fully covered. Nevertheless, even though I only sat in the car, it felt good – it was progress! I was told that taking a warm shower before bed will help moisten my throat and potentially prevent coughing at night, so I tried it.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 scabs Healing
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Day 6 and the pain is just about the same as yesterday, but that relentless ache is exhausting. I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel (and it’s not a train) but when I am tired and weak and freaking out because my Mom went home and my husband decided to sleep in this morning leaving me to take care of my nearly 7 year old son…. Well, I got a little teary.
My husband took a gander at my throat today and declared it “gross, but healing.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Day 6 = Ouch
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : day 6 here and I have to say, it definitely has been the hardest two days so far. I am spent and am sick of not eating the way i want to. I have been sticking to cold drinks and liquid meals. Spoke with my PA today and she said to do my best to keep the scabs on for a minimum 10days by drinking tons of liquids. The longer they stay on, the better the new skin underneath will be…so I am doing all I can to keep these puppies attached. I have given up on eating anything warm or slightly solid,I just want this over with!!
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Yeah, so I slept for about 12 hours. But now I think sleeping that long was the worst idea ever! My hot pot ran out of water and I wasn’t sipping on water for those 12 hours. I just drank a smoothie mix every 4 hours to take my meds. I woke up with about 8/10 pain, tried to get up and passed out in the hallway. Oh Joy! My ears are killing me!
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Side note, i have lost like 12 lbs. Probably not healthily as all i have consumed it water, gatorade, jello and apple sauce. Those products are not known for their nutritional content. I have made two healthy juice drinks using my juicer, but don’t think that compensates for the lack of nutrients for the last week.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : The pain is rather terrible today, it was much worse last night.
At about 3am i woke up with pain, it was as if someone was stabbing my throat with a needle or pin
and i woke up this morning with blood in my mouth. Not a lot but it still scared me! I rinsed my mouth with ice water and sucked a piece of ice and it stopped.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Day 6- good morning, post op app’t- stints in nose removed, I can BREATHE again 🙂 went shopping at the mall for a few hours after- got home exhausted & later in pain ;(
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Recovery Day 6 (post-op day 7):
Another day filled with pain. Was able to drink an ensure today but did not eat much. Was able to eat some popsicles. During the evening time had horrible pain shooting from the right side of my throat and it felt like a burning feeling when I would drink anything almost as if I was drinking acid even when I drank water. Had to take a bit more Lortab to curve the pain. Looked at my throat with a flashlight for the first time since the surgery and it looked like a battle zone in there. Lots of white coating all over the tonsil beds and my uvula is still swollen very large and kind of sticking to one of the sides of my throat. Could see the white scabs as well.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 : Day 6: I cried over applesauce and pudding. It hurts to swallow, I can’t yawn and just try to blow your nose without wanting to fall over and die. This pain is ridiculous. I woke up in the middle of the night with a dry throat and more pain than I could imagine so I dragged myself downstairs and forced down some pain meds to help me take the pain.
Tonsillectomy Day 6 :day 6 of my recovery and in the worst pain ever. I thought I was on the mend, only having pain on the one side but then I started to cough, and it kept me up all of last night and all of that white membrane over the surgery site is starting to come off as well as some of the scabs… is that normal? I am very scared that with my coughing it’s going to cause issues that will result in another surgery.
I’m so sorry you are in so much pain! I got my tonsils out in February (I’m 25). I remember on day 6/7 I lost my mind. I also ended up back at the doctor for stronger pain meds and anti-nausea medication, promethazine. All the medications were making me really sick too. Make sure you have a humidifier going, if you can’t afford one try a hot pot (that is what I used). Icing sometimes helps, just make sure it is soft squishy ice or a bag of peas. I know it is miserable, hang in there. Although it was hell for about 12 days, I’ve been so much healthier and happier since I got my tonsils out. You can do it! Good Luck! <3
Worst day yet. Not because of the pain but because of the seemingly endless length of this process! By day 6 of most things (except mono, which I was so lucky to have last year) you’re usually on the up and up. Now I know what everyone means by depression, and just plain old malaise. My throat pain has been steady, probably a 6/10 and I gave up trying to wean the percs. I’m not even hungry. I forced myself to eat some mashed potatoes and an ensure but that’s it besides water. Sweet stuff stings. The mucus is a pain in the ass, my breath smells and no matter how much I brush it doesn’t feel clean in there. So tomorrow after I get up and get my pain under control I’m going out to break this cycle. Just gonna wander and do a little shopping and hope that makes me feel better mentally. I’m trying to be a man about this situation….but it’s just so east to wallow in self-pity.
Hm… very crappy day today. Hurting all over the place in my throat, the scabs, the insanely irritating dry cough, not being able to sleep last night and knives in my ears down my neck and throat. O U C H !
Today I just wanted to cry… Crossing my fingers for a better day tomorrow!
I’m a 31 year old male. Had a tonsillectomy, along with a deviated septum repair, on Wednesday, October 10. Surgery day was a relative breeze. I have apnea, so they admitted me for a day to the hospital. After I came out of anesthesia, they began giving me morphine. That night, I ate two bowls of jello and three pudding cups and drank plenty of water. My throat was sore, but not unbearable. I stayed on morphine until 3 AM the next morning when I requested to be switched to the liquid lortab I would be using once home. The liquid lortab actually seemed to provide more consistent relief from the pain. Day 1 Post Op (Thursday, October 11)was also not that bad, either. I came home. I ate pudding, jello and hot chicken noodle soup. I flushed my nose with salt water (sort of nasty, but sort of relieving to see all of the junk coming out). I slept an awful lot. I had the thought that most of the people who post on this site must have bad experiences or low pain thresholds. I told my wife I might be able to go back to work on Monday, October 15th. Day 2 Post Op (Friday, October 12) I started to feel a little worse. I decided it was attributable to eating the chicken noodle soup and that I needed to stick to a cold liquid diet. We increased my medicine schedule so that I was taking the liquid lortab every 3 1/2 hours versus 4 hours. I also developed a regiment where I would squirt my throat with chloraseptic, take the liquid lortab and then suck on a lidocane lollipop. About an hour after the meds had set in, I’d start chugging water. We set alarms at night to stick to the schedule and had a humidifier set up in the room to try and keep my throat moist. Despite all of these efforts, I woke up on Day 3 Post Op (Saturday, October 13) with the worst pain yet. In addition to a chronically dry, painful throat, I started experiencing intense ear aches and nausea. To prevent throwing up, we added phenergen to my medicine regiment. This helped with the nausea, but added to feeling generally disoriented, which made it hard to cope with the pain/interact with my wife. Found myself getting irrationally angry at times and unable to express what I was thinking/feeling. Anyhow, Day 3 Post Op was not a good day. Saturday night, I made myself drink even more water throughout the night. I woke up on Day 4 Post Op (Sunday, October 14) feeling a little better. My throat was still sore, but I was not nauseated and did not have the same type of intense ear pain. By midday, that all changed. I started feeling like I needed to vomit, took some more phenergen and the cycle started all over again. By Sunday night, my ears were absolutely killing me. I applied an ice pack to my throat for the first time, but that brought limited relief. I tried chewing some gum after reading that it could help, but that also brought limited relief. Ultimately, the only thing that helped was sleeping. We forgot to set alarms for my medicine Sunday night, but luckily, my body woke itself up when it was time and I stayed on schedule. On Day 5 Post Op (Monday, October 15), I woke up feeling pretty normal. I did some work from home. I didn’t spend the day just lying around. I had a brief period of nausea and what felt like some fever, but avoided taking any more phenergen. I ate more than I had been eating, including some frozen yogurt, some pudding and even some hot noodle soup. Around bedtime, my next dose of medicine was due at 11:45 PM. I was feeling so good that I went to sleep at 10:45 with instruction to my wife not to wake me up for medicine. I woke up at 12:45 AM in excruciating pain. It felt like there were two giant marbles lodged in the back of my throat, it was on fire and my head/ears were throbbing. I took the liquid lortab, sucked on a lidocane lollipop for a few minutes and then was able to go back to sleep. I woke up again around 4 AM. Again, I was in excruciating pain and felt like I was almost choking. For a moment I had the thought that perhaps my scabs were coming off and that was the cause of the pain and the choking sensation. I got a flashlight and looked at the back of my throat in a mirror. It look like there has been some scab “movement” around the edges of my throat (I can see some pink flesh), but not much. Overall, everything is just very swollen back there. The white blobs where my tonsils used to be appear almost as large as my tonsils did pre-surgery. My uvula is enormous. Even my tongue is a little swollen. It all appears to be exacerbated, somewhat, by the onset of oral thrush, which is something I’ve tried desperately to avoid. I say all of this to say that my original assessment of this surgery and the people who posted on this site were wrong. This surgery is nothing to laugh about and I now understand how people can complain for days on end about it. Just when you think you’re getting better, something else hits you. The difficult part has been explaining to a skeptical employer why a “kid’s surgery” requires that I miss this much work.
I’m 17 and I’m on day 7 post-op, I feel so much better today its weird to think two days ago I was in agony with a sore throat and earache! But I can honestly say the pain just disappears, today I’ve had a cheese and marmite sandwich for lunch and I’m actually looking forward to dinner! There is light at the end of the tunnel!
I am on day 5 of my recovery, my throat doesn’t actually hurt that bad however I have an excruciating ear ache both sides! This prevents me from chewing and swallowing. I’m taking all my medicine on time but it doesn’t seem to be touching the pain at all. Yesterday I bit the bullet and had a twister meal from KFC, what a pain that was. Today I’ve managed some tomato soup and a couple of pieces of bread with jam! I’m very scared to sleep again tonight because I know I will wake up in a horrific pain again tomorrow! I just want this whole ordeal to be over with 🙁
Ah, day 6. Throughout the night I woke up regularly, but with no pain?! And now I have just woken up and my god the ear ache is back and there’s a burning feeling in my throat? I hope this burning feeling is the scabs coming off- *apparently* all is meant to be better after the scabs come off! We’ll see. Yesterday my mum buttered and got rid of the crusts from two slices of bread and popped some jam on there then cut them into strips, probably the easiest thing I’ve eaten so far! Don’t get me wrong swallowing hurts but if you take small bites and swallow smaller pieces its heaven on earth. I’m hoping there’s light at the end of the tunnel- day 7-9 is *apparently* when things start shaping up. Fingers crossed! 😐
Hi Stacy:
I’m so sorry you are in so much pain! I got my tonsils out in February (I’m 25). I remember on day 6/7 I lost my mind. I also ended up back at the doctor for stronger pain meds and anti-nausea medication, promethazine. All the medications were making me really sick too. Make sure you have a humidifier going, if you can’t afford one try a hot pot (that is what I used). Icing sometimes helps, just make sure it is soft squishy ice or a bag of peas. I know it is miserable, hang in there. Although it was hell for about 12 days, I’ve been so much healthier and happier since I got my tonsils out. You can do it! Good Luck! <3
Emily
Worst day yet. Not because of the pain but because of the seemingly endless length of this process! By day 6 of most things (except mono, which I was so lucky to have last year) you’re usually on the up and up. Now I know what everyone means by depression, and just plain old malaise. My throat pain has been steady, probably a 6/10 and I gave up trying to wean the percs. I’m not even hungry. I forced myself to eat some mashed potatoes and an ensure but that’s it besides water. Sweet stuff stings. The mucus is a pain in the ass, my breath smells and no matter how much I brush it doesn’t feel clean in there. So tomorrow after I get up and get my pain under control I’m going out to break this cycle. Just gonna wander and do a little shopping and hope that makes me feel better mentally. I’m trying to be a man about this situation….but it’s just so east to wallow in self-pity.
Hm… very crappy day today. Hurting all over the place in my throat, the scabs, the insanely irritating dry cough, not being able to sleep last night and knives in my ears down my neck and throat. O U C H !
Today I just wanted to cry… Crossing my fingers for a better day tomorrow!
I’m a 31 year old male. Had a tonsillectomy, along with a deviated septum repair, on Wednesday, October 10. Surgery day was a relative breeze. I have apnea, so they admitted me for a day to the hospital. After I came out of anesthesia, they began giving me morphine. That night, I ate two bowls of jello and three pudding cups and drank plenty of water. My throat was sore, but not unbearable. I stayed on morphine until 3 AM the next morning when I requested to be switched to the liquid lortab I would be using once home. The liquid lortab actually seemed to provide more consistent relief from the pain. Day 1 Post Op (Thursday, October 11)was also not that bad, either. I came home. I ate pudding, jello and hot chicken noodle soup. I flushed my nose with salt water (sort of nasty, but sort of relieving to see all of the junk coming out). I slept an awful lot. I had the thought that most of the people who post on this site must have bad experiences or low pain thresholds. I told my wife I might be able to go back to work on Monday, October 15th. Day 2 Post Op (Friday, October 12) I started to feel a little worse. I decided it was attributable to eating the chicken noodle soup and that I needed to stick to a cold liquid diet. We increased my medicine schedule so that I was taking the liquid lortab every 3 1/2 hours versus 4 hours. I also developed a regiment where I would squirt my throat with chloraseptic, take the liquid lortab and then suck on a lidocane lollipop. About an hour after the meds had set in, I’d start chugging water. We set alarms at night to stick to the schedule and had a humidifier set up in the room to try and keep my throat moist. Despite all of these efforts, I woke up on Day 3 Post Op (Saturday, October 13) with the worst pain yet. In addition to a chronically dry, painful throat, I started experiencing intense ear aches and nausea. To prevent throwing up, we added phenergen to my medicine regiment. This helped with the nausea, but added to feeling generally disoriented, which made it hard to cope with the pain/interact with my wife. Found myself getting irrationally angry at times and unable to express what I was thinking/feeling. Anyhow, Day 3 Post Op was not a good day. Saturday night, I made myself drink even more water throughout the night. I woke up on Day 4 Post Op (Sunday, October 14) feeling a little better. My throat was still sore, but I was not nauseated and did not have the same type of intense ear pain. By midday, that all changed. I started feeling like I needed to vomit, took some more phenergen and the cycle started all over again. By Sunday night, my ears were absolutely killing me. I applied an ice pack to my throat for the first time, but that brought limited relief. I tried chewing some gum after reading that it could help, but that also brought limited relief. Ultimately, the only thing that helped was sleeping. We forgot to set alarms for my medicine Sunday night, but luckily, my body woke itself up when it was time and I stayed on schedule. On Day 5 Post Op (Monday, October 15), I woke up feeling pretty normal. I did some work from home. I didn’t spend the day just lying around. I had a brief period of nausea and what felt like some fever, but avoided taking any more phenergen. I ate more than I had been eating, including some frozen yogurt, some pudding and even some hot noodle soup. Around bedtime, my next dose of medicine was due at 11:45 PM. I was feeling so good that I went to sleep at 10:45 with instruction to my wife not to wake me up for medicine. I woke up at 12:45 AM in excruciating pain. It felt like there were two giant marbles lodged in the back of my throat, it was on fire and my head/ears were throbbing. I took the liquid lortab, sucked on a lidocane lollipop for a few minutes and then was able to go back to sleep. I woke up again around 4 AM. Again, I was in excruciating pain and felt like I was almost choking. For a moment I had the thought that perhaps my scabs were coming off and that was the cause of the pain and the choking sensation. I got a flashlight and looked at the back of my throat in a mirror. It look like there has been some scab “movement” around the edges of my throat (I can see some pink flesh), but not much. Overall, everything is just very swollen back there. The white blobs where my tonsils used to be appear almost as large as my tonsils did pre-surgery. My uvula is enormous. Even my tongue is a little swollen. It all appears to be exacerbated, somewhat, by the onset of oral thrush, which is something I’ve tried desperately to avoid. I say all of this to say that my original assessment of this surgery and the people who posted on this site were wrong. This surgery is nothing to laugh about and I now understand how people can complain for days on end about it. Just when you think you’re getting better, something else hits you. The difficult part has been explaining to a skeptical employer why a “kid’s surgery” requires that I miss this much work.
I’m 17 and I’m on day 7 post-op, I feel so much better today its weird to think two days ago I was in agony with a sore throat and earache! But I can honestly say the pain just disappears, today I’ve had a cheese and marmite sandwich for lunch and I’m actually looking forward to dinner! There is light at the end of the tunnel!
I am on day 5 of my recovery, my throat doesn’t actually hurt that bad however I have an excruciating ear ache both sides! This prevents me from chewing and swallowing. I’m taking all my medicine on time but it doesn’t seem to be touching the pain at all. Yesterday I bit the bullet and had a twister meal from KFC, what a pain that was. Today I’ve managed some tomato soup and a couple of pieces of bread with jam! I’m very scared to sleep again tonight because I know I will wake up in a horrific pain again tomorrow! I just want this whole ordeal to be over with 🙁
I’m 17 by the way! I had mine out due to chronic tonsillitis.
Ah, day 6. Throughout the night I woke up regularly, but with no pain?! And now I have just woken up and my god the ear ache is back and there’s a burning feeling in my throat? I hope this burning feeling is the scabs coming off- *apparently* all is meant to be better after the scabs come off! We’ll see. Yesterday my mum buttered and got rid of the crusts from two slices of bread and popped some jam on there then cut them into strips, probably the easiest thing I’ve eaten so far! Don’t get me wrong swallowing hurts but if you take small bites and swallow smaller pieces its heaven on earth. I’m hoping there’s light at the end of the tunnel- day 7-9 is *apparently* when things start shaping up. Fingers crossed! 😐