emergency room.

last night i had one of the top 5 most terrifying experiences of my life.
not that i really think a blog is the most appropriate way to talk about it,
but i lost my voice almost completely and i know everyone is gonna ask me,
and i dont wanna have to explain it 20 or 30 times.
plus i firmly believe that when you write about emotional experiences its good to do it
while the memories and feelings are incredibly fresh.


so around 4pm yesterday afternoon i started spitting up fresh blood.
fresh blood was just trickling out of my mouth.
this scared the shit out of me, but my parents rushed home and called my surgery dr.
and the nurses said that was pretty normal.


ok so if you refer to the picture in my last blog, you'll see my huge tonsils.
when they take tonsils out, they basically just cut out those two big pieces of raw hamburger meat i had in the back of my throat. i told them to save my tonsils after they removed them so i could look at them, and they looked like two miniature brains.
anyway, after they remove them, they cauterize the open wounds, and big white mucusy scabs form over where the tonsils where. after about 5-10 days those scabs fall off, you swallow them, your throat gets more sore for awhile, and then you heal. typically when this happens, they will bleed a bit, so thats what the doctors and nurses figured it was.

well fast forward to around 8pm. i started bleeding again. only a whole lot more this time. blood was gushing out of my mouth. i started throwing up blood. thick chunks of blood and fresh blood. between 8-930pm i threw up about 8-10 cups of blood and water, mostly blood, and big big chunks of blood.

my parents rushed me to the emergency room around 830. i threw up blood all over the bathroom there, and scared the shit out the ER nurses. at this point i started getting incredibly scared. actually i was terrified. i had no idea what was going on and neither did my parents. we thought i might be throwing up the back of my throat, or my stomach lining. we had no clue. the looks on my parents faces was one of the hardest things ive ever had to see. they were scared to death. i was too, but knowing that they were made it terrible. even the nurses didnt know what to do.


another doctor from the ear, nose, and throat clinic came to emergency operate on me. (turns out he was the same doctor that was my dads post-op surgeon when my dad had his brain tumor, so that was very nice and kind of calming).

what had happened was that i had developed an enormous blood clot over one of my tonsils. the scabs had fallen off, and somehow things didnt heal properly.

here is a shoddy picture:


ok so as you can see, that white stuff is my tonsil scabs. thats what they look like, big white scabs. my uvula is swollen to about 3 times its normal size. the day after my surgery it was twice that big. so thats good. and then that big purple thing is my blood clot.


what they had to do was put me under anesthesia again, and suck that blood clot off and then re-cauterize it. additionally they had to pump my stomache because i had a lot of blood still in it that i had not thrown up yet that needed to get out of there.

while the blood clot was there i couldnt hardly swallow because it was blocking almost all of my throat. they say this happens to about 1 in 1000 patients. go me.

i was rushed through the ER and the hospital on a gurney, there were people shouting, there was a huge IV in my arm, there were tubes up my nose. i was absolutely terrified. and more than anything i felt so bad for my parents because they were terrified and parents are not supposed to show you their fear so i knew it was bad.


anyway, they pumped me full of fluids because i had gotten incredibly dehydrated too. i also had not eaten anything since last thursday. the only things i had eaten in the past 6 days (a milkshake, one pudding, a mug of chicken broth, two bites of jello, two bits of a peach, 3/4 of a piece of bread with pb&j) i had promptly thrown up.

so when i woke up they made me eat some ice cream, made sure i didnt throw it up and gave me new pain medicine and nausea medicine.

as it turns out this blood clot had been forming for a while and i had been swallowing blood for at least a day before i started spitting it up.



i was sent home about 1am.
they think i will now make a full tonselectomy recovery.
my scabs on the other side still need to heal, and the new ones too,
but it shouldnt be nearly as bad.
they said it would be highly unlikely that this would happen again.
and i feel a million times better than i did even yesterday morning before any of this.


that was the first time in my life i ever thought i really might die.
i DO NOT ever want to go through that again.
im still pretty emotional about the whole thing and want to burst into tears when i think about it, or look at my parents.
im so incredibly lucky, so lucky.

i didnt really need a wake up call on taking my life seriously,
i already do, i already live it to the fullest,
but this just proved all my theories even more.
you just never know you guys, you dont.
you really need to be happy with yourself and do things for yourself.
lifes wayyyyy too short.



oh and also, i need to send tons of thanks and love
to everyone who has sent me get better and well wishes in texts and messages.
it means so much you have no idea.

hello everyone!

hi, i am alison's tonsils:



great to meet you!

if you go look in the mirror at the back of your throat where your own tonsils are,
you will see the difference between your healthy tonsils, and me, hamburger meat tonsils.


this Friday, the 9th, i will be being removed from alison's throat
so that she may breathe, swallow, and smoke lots of cigarettes,
without coughing up nasty gunk every morning.

because of my removal, alison will be in extreme amounts of pain.
she is required by her doctor to take at least 8-10 days off of work in order to heal.
hopefully she wont die while she is under general anesthestic, or when the knife cuts her open.


alison will just be sitting around her parents house and possibly her apt. after the surgery.
she would love visitors and text msgs, because she wont be able to talk.

every person she has spoken to about getting their tonsils out at her age,
has said it was one of the most painful experiences of their life.
obviously, she is excited.

im scared personally, because im so used to causing sickness and annoyance in her life,
and now ill be gone forever. oh well. maybe shell post sexy picture of her new throat sans me, hamburger meat tonsils.

when im dead ill rest.

"I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall. But I don't honestly know what kind.... Are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

You could tell he was trying to concentrate and all.

"It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?"

"Yes. Sure," I said. I did, too. "But you're wrong wrong about the hating business. I mean about hating football players and all. You really are. I don't hate too many guys. What I may do, I may hate them for a little while, like this guy Stradlater I knew at Pencey, and this other boy, Robert Ackley. I hated them once in a while -- I admit it -- but it doesn't last too long, is what I mean. After a while, if I didn't see them, if they didn't come in the room, or if I didn't see them in the dining room for a couple of meals, I sort of missed them. I mean I sort of missed them."

"All right. Listen to me a minute now . . . I may not word this as memorably as I'd like to, but I'll write you a letter about it in a day or two. Then you can get it all straight. But listen now, anyway."

He started concentrating again.

Then he said,

"This fall I think you're riding for - it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. You follow me?"