A week ago, my grandson Carter had his tonsils removed and since then his throat’s been like sandpaper. He’s enduring the temporary discomfort of swallowing, and even worse for him, the elimination from his diet of his favorite snack food, Russet potato chips. For the person who may not be up on potato chip culture, Russets are the burnt chips that didn’t make the cut with the other golden ones that came down the factory line. However, they’re too scratchy for a tender throat, and Carter is learning that he may have to take a pass if he wants his throat to heal.
When I had my tonsils out at the ripe old age of seven, I was told I could eat as much ice cream as I wanted. For a child, hearing that was like winning the nutritional lottery, and developed in me a deep transcendent, almost devotional love of ice cream. The memories of it’s cool and soothing consistency sliding past my absent tonsils still touches off a sensory holiday in my throat. Just to take full advantage of the situation, I insisted on eating it out of a glass bowl with a plastic spoon, and when you have surgery at seven years old, you get your way on things like that.
As the time for my surgery approached, my mother and father had a talk with me about what I could expect. My mom was a nurse, and my father was a surgeon, so there was plenty of medical information they could impart, probably too much. For example, my father used the word “extricate,” instead of “take out,” to describe the process of removing my little helpless tonsils and adenoids. I heard the word “extricate” as “extra cake,” which was the perfect partner for ice cream, and likewise, I misconstrued the word adenoids for asteroid, like the ones circling the home of my favorite cartoon family, the Jetsons. Anticipating ice cream and cake, and endless hours of cartoons, the upcoming removal of my tonsils really didn’t sound bad at all.
Be that as it may, I took in every word of the lecture, including how my tonsils serve to soak up bacterium, and why they are a culture for the germination of all kinds of diseases. As my parents went further and further into detail, I began to cower in the corner of the couch with my stuffed chipmunk, Alvin, a character from another favorite cartoon of mine, The Chipmunks.
Now, I began to worry for the first time about how my body works, specifically the parts that were going to be removed, my tonsils and my adenoids, and I worried the surgeon might take out my tongue also if he hadn’t slept very well the night before. As I was a rather imaginative kid, I also wondered whether I could see the diseases and germs growing in my adenoids, and whether they would look anything like the asteroids I’d seen on the Jetsons.
Being that my father was a surgeon and had a few privileges the rest of us don’t have at a hospital, I asked him if the doctor slicing out my tonsils out could save them for me so I could inspect them for myself. So, good to his word, my dad came home shortly after my surgery with my tonsils in a pale green laboratory jar.
“Had lunch with you doctor today,” he said, “and as requested, here they are, your tonsils!”
I turned the jar around slowly in my hand, looking for any signs of scurvy or rickets, then finally said, “They look like my big toes.”
Yet, the oval pink globs were nothing like I expected. For one, they were floating, and secondly, they came complete with blood vessels and flesh parts still connected, as if they could be reattached in my throat should I decide I wanted to have them put back in.
As a side bar here, I realize that graphic descriptions of the human body are disgusting to most adults. Yet, one must realize I was being raised by parents in the medical field, which made the use of anatomical details perfectly fair game. For example, it wasn’t unusual around our house to have a few kidney stones on the shelf as conversation pieces, or a pair of forceps and a couple of retractors on the dinner table, maybe a few urine samples on slides under a microscope in case we got tired of looking at cartoons.
And so, as I sat and stared at most of my throat floating in the jar, eating a bowl of ice cream I immediately thought of how cool it would be to take them to school for Show and Tell. Yes sir, I thought, I’ll take my tonsil to school, oh yes I will, get up in front of my entire class with my authentic hoarse voice and tell how I was put to sleep counting backwards from seventeen, for no reason I could think of, looking up at a man with a mask on and the next minute I was wide awake with a nurse handing me a bowl of vanilla ice cream!
As luck would have it, my healing and return to school fell right before the Thanksgiving break, a time when teachers were desperate for anything that might keep kids interested and occupied, a time when kids were tired of pilgrim worksheets, and making scarecrows out of paper plates and colorful pipe cleaners.
On the big day of Show and Tell, I kept my tonsils hidden in my lunch box, believing at the time that presenting a part of my body in a jar would be more dynamic if there was an element of surprise. Under my desk I had tonsil facts written out on index cards, and as I went over those, I tried not to pay any attention to the pigtailed girl showing and telling in front of me, Elke Der-Glekenhausen, who was talking in English and fake German, passing around various German desserts samples in dixie cups.
Und dis von,” she said, “is my favoreet. Das its ein Schokoladen Pfankuchen. It is so yummy, but in Germany they say schmackhaften! Und dis one ist ein ApfelStrudel, made from real Deutsche apfels my Großmutter sent over a month ago. Und dis one…und dis one… und dis one.” On and on and on she went, ad nauseum, little Miss Muffet, Fraulein Elke Der-Glekenhausen.
I didn’t think she’d ever quit, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dixie cups in my life, then or since. Kids were taking three and four pfankuchens and strudel’s apiece and I was getting more and more nervous because I didn’t want to have wait another whole day before I got to present. So, I was trying to move her presentation along by passing my deutsche samples right over to Reggie, who I shared a desk with. He wore size large T-shirt, so he really didn’t need any extra desserts, but he was throwing them back as fast as I could hand them to him, as if he’d never eaten a square meal in his life. I thought my plan was working, but just as things looked like they might be winding down, Little Miss Muffet Elke began to sing! Loud! I couldn’t believe my ears!
Here I was, waiting patiently for my turn at Show and Tell, to show my unique anatomical abominations floating in a jar, had practice my speech, and copied notes on index cards, and found myself in the middle of a round of Edelweiss from the Sound of Music, the German version, which had just hit the movie screens that weekend.
“Edelweiss, Edelweiss, Jeden morgan Grüßt du mich, du mich, Edelweiss…” and then Elke, the Miss Muffet of Show and Tell, raised her hand like a conductor of a symphony and signaled others to sing along with her, and every kid in class began singing, softly at first, mostly because their mouths were full of various German desserts, but then fuller, and I looked over at Reggie with a Dixie cup raised in each hand and he was singing too, spitting out tiny crumbs of Kartufelln.
The whole scene hit a tender spot in me. Maybe I was malnourished, maybe I was still mildly depressed from my throat surgery, I’m not sure, but I took a bite of a Gesundheit frosted cookie, which melted on my tongue instantly and was better than any ice cream I had ever eaten. In fact, for the first time in two weeks, I felt no pain at all in my throat, and forgot all about telling anyone about the anatomy of a tonsil, how they soak up all the bacterium that pass down our throat. I began to hum along, and then sing quietly myself – strange, meaningless German words like danke and Heimlich Maneuver, lyrics that had no bearing on the song whatsoever, but German words that sounded very German with my husky, raspy, surgically impaired voice. The pale green jar I had in my lunch box that was poised to wow my audience on Show and Tell day, never made it out of my lunch box. Somehow, talking about my surgery didn’t seem appropriate right before Thanksgiving in a classroom full of Wunderkind whose stomachs were full of Spätzle und Schwartzwalder-kirschtorte from Deutschland. My tonsils would have to live to show another day.
Yet, they never did.
I found the green bottle stuffed away in an old box some forty seven years later and took them over to show my grandson just last week and we sat on the couch together, and I put my arm around him as I sang an incorrect version of Edelweiss, and he ate his fifth bowl of ice cream for the day while looking intently at the pale pink blobs that were still floating in formaldehyde.