No, I am not a grandmother … yet.

It seems that every time one of my children has his/her tonsils taken out, the family gets a bunch of good stories out of it.

Christi was only four when hers were removed, and refused to eat, drink, or talk after the surgery.  They kept her an extra night in the hospital, and of course I stayed with her. 

I was 8.9999 months pregnant at the time and already took up more space than two people, and they had us in a tiny room with no room for a rollaway.  So the “three” of us shared the twin bed, but it didn’t really matter because none of us slept anyway. 

Things didn’t get much better after we got home.  She still wouldn’t eat or drink because it hurt too much to swallow, and she wouldn’t take her pain medicine because, well, that involved swallowing it.  I coaxed, pleaded, and begged.  Finally, the threat of being returned to the hospital convinced her to drink.

It was traumatic at the time, but now seems pretty funny.  Everything she drank came out her nose.  She was so used to having the huge tonsils to help her swallow, she was going to have to relearn how to drink.

When she spoke, air would rush out her nose at the wrong times, and it came out sounding like a cross between German and Navajo.  She wouldn’t talk in public for a month because she had to hold her nose to be understandable. 

My son, Donnie, was seventeen when he had his taken out.  He thought the painkillers were really cool.  He liked how, after he had taken one, he could punch himself in the leg, for instance, and it wouldn’t hurt.  Cool.

One day I came in from work, and one of the pictures on the wall was hanging really low.  Donnie rushed in and said, “Before you say anything, let me explain!”

It turns out that he had taken one of the aforementioned painkillers, and he was experimenting with cool things that didn’t hurt, one of which was kicking the wall.  When I took the low-slung picture off the wall, sure enough there was a nice little foot-shaped hole in the wall.  Really cool.

Elizabeth, my 15-year-old daughter had her tonsils out last week.  As the orderly was wheeling her down the hall to her room after surgery, with her boyfriend and me trailing behind, I ran into an old friend.

We hugged and started catching up, and she looked back and forth between Elizabeth, her boyfriend, and me, like she was trying to figure out what had happened and what to say.  I also thought maybe she didn’t recognize Elizabeth because she hadn’t seen her in so long.

“That’s Elizabeth!” I offered.  “She’s grown up, hasn’t she?”

“She sure has,” my friend confirmed.  The confusion was still there, though.  “I’m a new grandmother!” she finally replied. 

I looked over her shoulder, saw the nursery, and realized we were in the maternity ward.  Turns out the hospital was really full, and they had put several of the tonsil patients in this wing, including my daughter.

Finally, it dawned on me.  My friend thought Elizabeth was there to have a baby!  Why else would they be wheeling her to a room in the maternity ward, looking like she’d just been through a war?

“She had a tonsillectomy!” I exclaimed.  We both started laughing, thinking about how it had looked, and how innocent it was.

No, I’m not a grandmother.  It’s one thing I’m really looking forward to … but not yet!