Well, not traumatic exactly, but I was certainly taken aback. The reason I asked him was that I’d done some research on the subject and learned that some dentists actually will try to help patients find non-surgical cures for them. This is because tonsil stones are one cause of halitosis, and dentists often have patients who need help with that problem.
My dentist actually sneered at me and said, “That’s not my department. You have to pay to see an ENT for that.” Like I was trying to dodge some big doctor’s bill by trying to trick him into doing something about it.
Wow, mine did exactly what you hoped for- told me alternate ways to get rid of them. They don’t cause bad breath for me, thankfully (mostly because the second they fall out I spit them out) so it’s not much of a worry except for
they’re damn annoying
I am always a little afraid to sneeze without a tissue. (How disgusting is that image).
And my dentist totally relieved any stress I might have had about them.
I’ve got big man hands and a normal sized mouth. What the hell are you freaks of nature (esp you ladies) doing that lets you grab at your tonsils? I never even imagined such a thing was possible. Do you have spidery little fingers, and big gaping maws that let you play around in there?
Who said anything about “grabbing” their tonsils? Some people here said they could prod them with an index finger; most of the rest of us are using long, slender implements to prod them. All I had to do was to press the eraser end of a pencil down on my tonsil to pop out the Stone of Unusual Size.
I have a very small mouth for an adult, actually. (They have to use child-size plates when they take impressions.) I don’t know how anyone else does it, but in order to see my tonsils, I have to get just the right angles with a magnifying mirror and a bright light. It’s not easy.
Are these things really hard and stone-like? I’ve never, ever heard of these before. I had my tonsils out at age nivne, but one partially grew back, I’ve been told. I have no idea what to even look for!
They’re whitish with gray, yellow, green, orange, and/or other tinges of color to them. They’re solid but kind of soft and crumbly. Think feta cheese, only the outside has the soft pearl-like sheen.
Which make sense, because they accrete like a pearl. Food particles get trapped in the tonsils; bacteria attack the food; white blood cells attack the bacteria.
I usually break open my tonsil stones and check them out, but I was too scared to this time.
When I was a lab tech, I had the opportunity to express a tonsil stone and plate it in the microbiology lab (why, yes, I was alone in microbiology that week. Why do you ask?). You will all be relieved, I’m sure, to know that no pathogens grew. In technical terms, it’s just a ball of yuck, I guess.
(Your cat ATE it? That is so unbelievably gross. And this from a former lab tech. Of course, they do like to lick their own bums a lot.)
I started getting tonsil stones in my right tonsil when I was in high school. I’ve always had allergy problems, but at that time the symptoms were shifting from itchy nose to post-nasal drip. They weren’t overly large – maybe about the size of a large pinhead – but they came out in clusters when the tonsil was massaged.
Last year, I got a sinus infection and had to take a course of antibiotics. That seemed to dry up the stone production in my right tonsil. But my left tonsil, which had never produced stones before, started filling up with rather sizable chunks – some about the size of 1/4 of a pencil eraser. I can definitely feel those when I remove them.
