Adenoids

After six months of dealing with Paul's mystery cough we have finally found the culprit. If you have been following the blog since about its beginning you may remember our posting on Paul's mystery cough. After ruling out asthma and allergies, a chest scan and EKG, and several doctors we now know that Paul has big adenoids.

Image taken from here

Never heard of them? Me neither, until we went to an ENT doctor. 

"Adenoids (or pharyngeal tonsil, or nasopharyngeal tonsil) are a mass of lymphoid tissue situated posterior to the nasal cavity, in the roof of the nasopharynx, where the nose blends into the throat." Thank you Wikipedia. They are a type of tonsil like the ones we all know but "Adenoids, unlike other types of tonsils, have pseudostratified columnar ciliated epithelium" 

Right, pseudo-sasafras columns cited epipens... thank you again Wikipedia for clearing that up for me.

Basically when Paul gets a cold he can't kick it like a normal kid because when he lays down the little space he has between his nose and throat, because it is mostly blocked by his big adenoids, becomes coated in snot and he wakes up startled because he can't breathe. This has resulted in several almost sleepless nights for Kevin and me the past few weeks, hence the lack of blogging. We've been posting 3-4 times a week since we started and this month this is our 3rd post total. Now that Paul is back to sleeping, thanks to many steroids, I hope to get back on track. 

The reason it took so long for them to figure out his adenoids are the problem is because he shows no other typical signs of big adenoids... frequent ear infections (never even had one) and big tonsils (just normal). It took a pretty sweet nose scope to be able to see the monsters. The fun factor of the scope was about a -7.

The good news about all of this is that it is fixable. This is way better to us than lifelong prescriptions and doctor visits. Basically they will go in and remove them in a few weeks and then we should be back to business as normal. 

Well, not normal for us, since up until now we thought we were really bad at helping a kid learn how to sleep, so normal like normal people with non-big adenoid toddlers. 

I'm hoping that we get to keep them in a jar like kids who get their regular tonsils removed. If we do, I promise to post pictures and you can promise not to post comments on how weird I am.