At home with my quarterly strep throat.

Annie Lamott writes about having her tonsils removed because of frequent bouts of strep throat and this thought has me oddly psyched...having my tonsils removed! Fun and retro...I have good health insurance right now so that won't be a factor, it's invasive enough to be a bit of a hassle but mostly in the Have To Eat A Lot Of Ice Cream and Mashed Potatoes sort of way and then I wouldn't get this fucking strep throat all the time. Here's the thing about being fun and retro...I was way too early with the whole trucker cap thing, wearing mine back in the early 90's in Seattle. Being too early trend-wise is the same as being wrong, really, and I think it would be unwise for me to get my tonsils out as a hipster move since it doesn't seem properly zeitgeisty. Being a reformed poser, I wanted some evidence to back up my pro tonsillectomy stance.

The web is relatively low-key on the topic of tonsils, as compared to, say, foreskins. The reason it sounds retro to have my tonsils taken out is because it IS retro. Old school thinking is that tonsils are useless and just sit there waiting to get infected. New thinking is that tonsils act as a fleshy filter, capturing bacterial sludge before it gets further into my body.

While I get strep seemingly all the time, I have to get it twice as often to qualify for a tonsillectomy. Also they have to swell waaaay up so that they not only hurt and impede ordinary swallowing and breathing but also my speech is muffled (a condition the sites all call "hot potato voice"). Anyway I've decided to be modern about it and figure out a better approach, not to scold my tonsils but to support them, give them the tools they need to get their job done.

All of this revisionist thinking on tonsils got me wondering about the appendix-do we dig that one as well now? Indeed we do, says Scientific American's Expert (as in "Ask an..."). The appendix holds lymphoid tissue which busies itself with recognizing "foreign antigens in ingested material". Again, it gets clogged, inflamed, becomes a pain in the ass but it's just doing its job.

I'm going to Toronto in a couple of weeks and there is a part of me that feels I should be diligently searching the web for interesting, idiosyncratic Toronto things instead of tracking down unpopular bodily organs on the web. On the other hand, now that I have spent all this time contemplating the appendix and tonsils I'm thankful to have a blog to put it and not just blurt it out to the next person I see. Nerdiness is always better when it can fill up a reservoir and not just leak everyplace, dripping and annoying.