Hello! Welcome back to the old guard and welcome to new subscribers—30 of you! This is both very exciting and very intimidating. I’m also giggling a bit, because I’m worried that some new followers might (justifiably) think this is a fun noodle blog. But today, I’m coming to you with something drastically, almost comically, different.
A little over a year ago, I wrote about the tonsillectomy I underwent last June, in a post aptly titled “Tonsillectomy (Pt. 1).” But less appropriately, there never came a part two. My intention had been to dedicate the second essay to how recovery went after the surgery, but as it turned out, I was still too deep in the throes of it to actually understand (or write about it) with any real clarity. What I ended up with were a lot of sappy drafts that had lots of sincere emotions but nothing much beyond that.
So, below is the year-delayed Pt. 2 of Tonsillectomy. If you want to read Pt. 1 first, you can find it here. But if not, the gist is that after a long series of tonsillitis infections that really impacted my health (physical and mental), I decided to have the painful, dreaded adult tonsilectomy. This led to a lot of pondering about well-being, happiness, etc.
I left that piece wondering if the surgery would successfully fix me, and thus be worth the trouble. And that’s where we’ll pick up here. A small word of content warning: I will be pretty candid about depression and disordered eating here, so if that’s not your Tuesday ~vibe, skip this one — I don’t mind! My friend Ellie Zimmerman wrote this delightful story about puppetry in Minnesota, which would make a lovely alternate read.
I first noticed my ability to taste was gone when I could start eating solid foods again, around mid-July 2023, two weeks after I got my tonsils out. Until that point I’d been on a disgusting diet of Ensure and ice chips, so the dream of tucking into a bowl of homemade chili after the throat scabs were healed had been dancing on my mind daily.
Chronic tonsillitis had robbed a sizeable chunk of my happiness for the previous few years. When I wasn’t actively sick, I was constantly exhausted at work. Weekend activities that were supposed to be fun just felt like chores. That’s what ultimately inspired me to get the surgery —the excitement to get back to enjoying my everyday life. I desperately wanted the energy for class with my 2nd graders, or to be present in my conversations with friends without checking the clock to see if I had done my social due diligence and could finally slither back into bed.
So when I sat down for that first “normal meal” after the surgery, I suppose there was secretly a lot riding on it. The beginning of the rest of my life, if you will. In the hands of a bowl of ground beef and beans. What could go wrong? So when I took the first bite —ready for the familiar rich flavors of many a childhood dinner— and found nothing, I was disoriented.
I had read all the warning papers before surgery, and this wasn’t a listed sideeffect. I called my surgeon, who assured me that this is a normal outcome, and should resolve itself within a few weeks. But it still didn’t sit right. He described the common post-operation sensation of foods tasting metallic and bitter, but the foods I was eating tasted like nothing at all.
So, naturally, as the panicky hypochondriac that I am, I saught answers myself on Reddit. And, naturally, I found threads parallel to my exact experience —an inexplicable loss of taste and smell after a tonsillectomy, which doesn’t go away in the expected timeline. People were posting after months or even years without these senses. I read pleas for answers from people just coming to terms with their situation, and advice from those who had now accepted the longevity. “Set reminders for your meals,” one commenter wrote. “You won’t remember that you want to eat anymore.” Another wrote, “Mine came back in a year, but never quite the same.” My gut did backflips as I saw myself reflected in all these accounts of confusion and distress.
I feel like now is a good time to introduce a necessary check to this story. That is, I know this wasn’t nearly, not even tangentally, the worst thing happening in the world. I actually have felt a pretty accute sense of shame this last year for feeling so blue about something so comparably unsevere. It’s part of why I put off completing this for so long.
You probably already discerned that my circumstances were comparable to the long-term sideeffects of COVID-19 in which people lose their smell, taste, or both. Because of this parallel, a lot of the published work I’ve read about sensory deficiencies come from people writing post-coronavirus infection. In their cases, they are all speaking from the perspective of someone who lived through the virus, when many others didn’t. Like me, they invariably make the caveat that “it could be worse.” And they’re right. It could be. That’s the reality.
But like them, I also can’t escape the other, personal reality—that this experience really impacted me and for a long time turned my life completely upside down. For that reason, I still think it merits exploration in writing, as I also found great catharsis in the shared stories of others. But I wanted to include this disclaimer, as it’s something I often think about when writing of my personal woes— this sort of heirarchy of negative experiences. I haven’t yet figured out my take on it, I’m still thinking, but I struggled to continue writing my story before mentioning it. If you have thoughts on this topic, drop me an e-mail, I’m very curious to continue parsing it out. Anyways.
Days bled into weeks and into months as I kept trying different foods and coming up blank. Bread turned out to be actively repulsive because, when flavorless, it’s kind of just a chewy mass, like a wet piece of paper. It was perhaps the first summer in 15 years I didn’t visit my favorite deli. I come from a big “family dinner” household, but old homecooked favorites became too daunting. I was worried that I would ruin a longtime memory, or a food close to the heart, by experiencing it lackluster in my now messed-up body. I attended a wedding where wine turned right back to water as it went down, proving in my increasingly fearful mind that even Jesus himself couldn’t help me now.
I had always had the suspicion that life is kind of just demarcated by one meal after the next, with stretches of time to kill in between. That was always just fine with me. If you read my last post, you know that mealtime occupies about a third of my brain space. But now these daily milestones that used to bring joy and, more scientifically, seratonin release, just seemed like soul-crushing obstacles. Going for a meal with a friend, once the most anticipated part of my day, now came with a sense of dread. In turn, that made me feel selfish. Shouldn’t time in the world with a loved one be enough? But it wasn’t that they weren’t enough; it was that the whole experience wasn’t right, like the dinner was happening in a vexing dream.
I returned to Hanoi a month after the surgery. By this point, the timeline forecasted by my doctor had come and gone with no improvement. To put it eloquently, I was freaking out. I returned to my old pal, the internet, for more self-diagnosis.
Online forums for nonexpert medical advice, such as my favorite r/tonsillectomy, get no love in modern discourse. They’re often regarded as virtual places for worriers, skeptics, and people unwilling to face their conditions with grace. But to me, and I know many others, they’ve been a saving grace when faced with a health-related mystery that isn’t necessarily being taken seriously by the medical powers that be. And in this case, the anonymous people in the forums, with their tiny profile pictures and lives weirdly similar to mine, were the reason I ever got an answer at all.
From my fellow worriers, my countrymen if you will, I learned this: that a small percentage of adult tonsillectomy patients experienced long term-loss of taste and smell when a nerve that lies just behind the tonsils, the glossopharyngeal nerve, was nicked or severed. This sensory disruption heals very slowly, or, in extremely rare cases where the nerve is severed and doesn’t heal properly, might not come back at all. It’s uncommon, but the symptoms aligned with my experience: loss of taste and smell, and complete numbness in one side of the throat. For me the left side, in which I had lost feeling entirely. All at once I felt both relieved that what I was feeling might have an answer, and horrified at what the answer could mean.
When I bothered my surgeon again with my new theory, he assured me that, with the surgical method he used, impacting the glossopharyngeal nerve would be impossible. These side effects might be explained by bruising on the tongue and throat. Sometimes, it can take 6 months for senses to return to normal, he said. So I kept waiting.
But waiting still meant getting through every day, and I was finding it increasingly challenging to do so with a hopeful face. I still remember sharply how I felt this time last year—afraid, lonely, and disillusioned. Kind of like a damp little mouse. Also like a mouse, I was hungry all the time. Losing the ability to taste and smell meant losing my appetite altogether, because it’s hard to crave anything when everything inevitably tastes like it came from the stationary store. This meant drastic, and very strange, changes to my diet. It’s summed up pretty well by this somewhat comical paragraph from a draft of this story written at the time:
Yesterday at noon I scrambled two eggs because I’ve decided that’s the most effective thing to eat right now. Eggs are also good because they are quick to make, so there isn’t too much time for thinking dark thoughts. If I listen to loud music, douse them in hot sauce, and wash the dishes quickly to hide the evidence, it’s like it never happened. There’s no time for the displeasure to catch up with me or to worry how long this might last.
I told you, I was very dramatic back then. Nothing screams Sad Girl like trying to fend off demons while you scramble eggs. But in my defense, when I wrote this, I didn’t know if it would end tomorrow, in December as promised by the doctor, or never. It was a confounding purgatory of feeling and trying not to feel everything all at once. An average Tuesday for Phoebe Bridgers.
Flash forward to the holidays, when I decided on traveling back to Minnesota for Christmas. Most of my siblings and my nieces were gathering at my parents house, so it was a rare opportunity to relive those cheerful, crowded Christmas memories of years past. In the midst of what had become a very isolating and dark few seasons of my life, the trip and the familiar warmth of home promised relief, or at least distraction. It was the first time in 15 years Duluth didn’t get snow for Christmas, but nontheless we played games, chatted, and lazed around together.
But over the last few months, as I’d worked out strategies to feed myself properly and left that problem behind (bye bye sad eggs!), I’d discovered the deeper, and to me far worse, problem with losing access to these two senses. That is, with my two most primal, most innate senses gone, the world around me, and therefore my experiences in it, had become inescapably dulled. Christmas, famous for providing a stark contrast between how we want to feel and how we actually feel, illustrated this loss that I hadn’t yet found the words for.
At even our most joyful dinner, I felt like I was sitting at the table wrapped in celophane. Unable to taste the food and drink that everyone else was convening over, I was experiencing the moment in a less visceral, less dynamic way. I’m not religious, but I think those rare, lively family meals always bring you closer to heaven. But what if heaven communicates through the most delicate pinpricks in your nerve endings? The scent of candles burning to their last, the taste of mishapped cookies baked by a child, canned cranberries. What if your nerves are no longer able to pick up those messages? It was like I hadn’t realized that life had always been quietly singing a beautiful song, until suddenly I was too far away to hear it.
This is what made the year so devastating, and what I couldn’t quite figure out how to articulate at the time. It wasn’t so much that I was missing out on the actual flavor of, say, turkey and potatoes, although I was. But that not tasting it was wedging a gap between me and the world around me. I was becoming untethered from those good and holy things— the smell of the coffee that only your parents brew, or the smell of your niece’s no-tear shampoo when she gives you a hug.
In her article for Vogue about this same topic, author Leslie Jameson interviews neuroscientist Afif Aqrabawi about the intersection of smell and memory. One quote in particular punched me right in the gut, as it explained in practical terms what I had been trying to pinpoint. About missing the sense of smell, Aqrabawi said:
“It’s not that you don’t have the memories anymore but that they aren’t being triggered with the same level of visceral immediacy. To put it simply: You have fewer emotional experiences each day.”
While smell is a commonly underappreciated sense, it is the only one that is connected directly to the emotional core of our brain, called the limbic system. Smell is responsible for the nostalgia we feel at the first smell of wet pavement in spring. It’s why chili on the stove really smells like teenage weeknight dinners. It’s why the odor of Swiffer pads brings me back to the sticky, hungover morning after a college party. It connects each day with the experiences of the ones before and therefore allows us to experience life in a three-dimensional way. As Jameson puts it, losing smell means “losing access to the internal landscape of your own past.”. It strips mundane happenings of the texture that makes them worthwhile. It slowly sucks the soul out of life, and it’s heartbreaking.
I’d take it another step forward too, by saying we don’t just lose some of our internal connections, but our connections to the people around us too. While all of us inhabit the world in a unique way, scents and tastes provide an external force that binds us together through shared experience. When those messages are being disrupted, you not only feel disconnected from the world but from those around you as well.
There was most certainly a lot of joy in that last Christmas home. But there was also a grave realization that even the most familiar place is flattened when it doesn’t smell or taste like home anymore. It was like arriving at somewhere that should be snowy, and finding it instead an unfamiliar shade of dull gray.
The week after Christmas marked the 6 month checkpoint since my surgery, at which time I was expected to have regained my damaged senses. Because I still hadn’t, I took the opportunity of being at home to visit my surgeon to discuss the situation. As it turns out, I am a very annoying patient to have. Never do surgery on me!
I sat in the same waiting room I had been in before my tonsillectomy, wondering if I would do it again, could I go back in time. In the 6-months since I had gotten my disgusting, disease-ridden tonsils out, I hadn’t been sick once save a mild sinus infection. While I was previously on antibiotics up to ten times a year, I hadn’t needed them once since surgery. But the thing I wanted to be able to do, which had inspired me to get the surgery —to be more present in my life —still felt out of my grasp.
The conversation with the doctor lasted all of five minutes. He’s a kind man, but very blunt and to the point, perhaps the result of performing a very routine surgery that doesn’t usually necessitate delicate bedside manner. The result of the appointment was this: he had previously sworn by his tonsillectomy method for the last 25 years. But after my case, he reviewed the most recent research and realized that it actually is possible to injure the glossopharyngeal nerve during a tonsillectomy. In other words, that the outcome I’d spent months trying to put out of my mind was the reality.
There are a lot of followup questions that I should have asked, but I just left, too stunned to sort through my thoughts. Looking back, I do respect and appreciate that Dr. Tonsils was honest with me that something must have gone wrong in the surgery. It saved me from continuing to question my own intuition, and at least released me to move on to the next stage of managing the situation. But in that moment, I just felt inconsolably angry and sad.
I had a big, fat cry in my car, in the grim basement parking lot of the downtown medical building. While getting answers was freeing, it didn’t feel like a good kind of freedom. It felt like being released into a desert and told there might be water out there, but all I could see stretched before me was vast space, devoid of any shimmer. It looked like the possibility of never again tasting instant oatmeal on a chilly camp morning, or smelling the faint smoke of Sean’s last evening cigarette on his clothes. In that moment, I would have done anything to put those tonsils right back in my throat. (I wonder if they can do that).
Studies show that there is a strong link between taste and smell loss and good old-fashioned clinical depression. If I had to pick a moment in this story that I reached that point, it would be here, at the intersection of hopelessness, uncertainty, and a general decrease in my daily seratonin levels. It turns out said intersection is actually located in the grim basement parking lot of the downtown medical building. Who knew! In retrospect, I probably should have already seen how bad things were getting in the ol’ brain. As someone who’s mental health has fluctuated in the past, I’ve become depressed over much less. But there it was, the parking garage closing in around me, and there I was, not ready to deal with it. That winter, I had little interest in feeling happier. Trying to do so felt like acknowledging a new normal, and I wasn’t prepared to stop grieving the loss of my old one.
Now here is where I really want to, and even started to, write about some miraculous shift in mindset that helped me crawl out of this self-pity spiral (and learn a valuable lesson in the process). How, with admirable composure, I set out through the darkness, torch in hand, searching for new sources of happiness. How I had the clarity of mind to look upon my situation with perspective and accept that sometimes bad things happen. There are so many beautiful, virtuous, and tempting bows with which to tie up the story (think: girl loses taste but discovers fulfillment in nature). I’ve typed out versions of at least three of them, but unfortunately none of them are really true. I’m not tough in that kind of way, and I’ve never been able to lasso my mind that successfully. This experience made me a lot of things, but actually I don’t think “a better person” is one of them. It’s another reason why I put off writing this for so long.
In researching for this essay, I read every other piece I came across on the topic. And I also struggled to find any other narrator who concluded by accepting these new terms graciously. I’m sure that person exists; the world is crammed with people more lionhearted than myself. But most of these stories finish as the writer either regains their lost senses a few weeks or months post-Covid, or is still anxiously hoping to. I have to wonder if, like me, the ones who are still somewhere in between aren’t sure what to say. It’s one of those things you’re not supposed to be complaining about a year later, but if you aren’t over it either, then what are you supposed to do?
Since the surgery, I’ve only personally known one other person who lost their taste and smell function for a reason unrelated to COVID— a friend’s mother who lost it permanently after a life-saving surgery. I was at a small backyard concert with this friend when I asked her how her mom felt about losing those senses, all things considered. In front of us, her mom was dancing bigger than anyone else, beer in hand. My friend said simply, “Oh, she really hates it. She’s always loved to cook.”
So anyway, here we are at a low point, with no moral to our name. The honest and not necessarily valiant truth of what got me through it occurred in two parts:
The first happened shortly after Christmas, in the middle of class with my second graders. Particularly, a day in which said second graders were being extraordinarily loud. In a fit of frustration, I found myself screaming at them from the top of my lungs to quiet down. When I looked up from my blinding anger, disoriented and flushed, to 25 sets of bewildered eyes looking back at me, I no longer recognized myself. For the entire school year, these kids had done me a great service. They brought me joy and purpose for 40 hours a week, when I otherwise felt I didn’t have any. They said weird and adorable things that made me forget myself. But as my good spirits left over the months, they had taken grace and patience with them. I’d become short-tempered and angry. And, that day, it made me a bad teacher.
Though I still felt staunchly uninterested in accepting my “new normal” health-wise, I realized in that classroom that I was losing myself all together. Like I said before, this wasn’t my first rodeo with depression, and for a while I’d known that I needed to return to antidepressants, which had helped me in similar previous periods in life. I was just so reluctant because it felt like admitting that it was time to start moving on. But it didn’t really feel like my decision to make anymore. Let’s be honest, nobody wants to be screaming at adorable, 3-foot-tall young people. So that very lunch break, with the little blue pills, down a still-numb throat, I begrudgingly took the next step in picking up the marbled I had dropped everywhere.
The meds didn’t fix everything; in my experience, they never do. But they slowly took a bit of the weight off, enough to let in a much-needed breath of fresh air (and to stop yelling at kids). From there, it was a game of distractions. I got really weird about yoga, and especially the part of yoga in which you try to have zero thoughts in your brain. I applied to jobs I knew I wouldn’t get or accept, to mimic the excitement of a new phase of life. I crafted some of my more elaborate costumes to date. I tired myself out.
And then, maybe 10 months after surgery, it started to come back. It wasn’t so much like a lightswitch miraculously flicking on, but a minor realization that things were starting to change. It was a strawberry. Not typically my favorite berry, as I find them sour, but I’d been eating them more with my dulled palate. Then one day it was just a little bit sour again, and I couldn’t believe it. Soon it was the zip of a pesto. Then, the salt of an oyster. None in full force, but each the flash of a memory I was preparing to lose forever.
Until then, I didn’t fully comprehend what a remarkable thing nerves are. When a nerve is severed, it doesn’t just heal, it regenerates at a rate of one millimeter per day, a recovery so rapid that it would actually be visible to the naked eye. It’s like they know the urgency of it all, and are desperately trying to feel again. Like flowers blooming towards the sun.
So long feeling isolated in this experience, it suddenly felt like I’d had a friend right there with me the whole time. I hadn’t been giving my body any credit. For years before the tonsil surgery, through many fevers and infections, my body felt more like an enemy that I had to wrestle with than a partner on the journey. But it turned out that while I’d been trying to get my head on straight, it was trying to heal as well. We wanted the same things, and I hadn’t felt that in a very long time.
This is where things started to get better more quickly. It’s where it becomes a story about about getting misty eyed over the smell of sunscreen, and other sappy details I won’t burden you with. I really wish I could say that I’d become a delightful person again before I started to regain taste and smell, but I’d only just started to. It would have taken me a lot longer to come to terms with the loss, and I would no longer expect anyone else to get over it quickly. I feel a sense of guilt towards my mystery reddit friends, and the people who are still be dealing with sensory dysfunction, or just discovering they have it. I think it’s also why I have no lesson to this. It hurt, I lost a part of myself, and that’s okay.
As I sit here wrapping this up, I’d say my capacity to taste and smell is at around 75%. I’m not going to be a sophisticated wine connoisseur anytime soon. Maybe ever. (Let’s be honest, was my palate ever that sophisticated anyway?) But everything is starting to resemble itself again. The pool smells like the final days of summer, and my Vietnamese coffee tastes like the ones that came before, the ones that have been mileposts of my life for years. I can hear the music again; it’s fainter, but it’s there. And for that, I am profoundly grateful.
The left side of my throat is still nearly completely devoid of sensation, and I suspect it will always be that way. I can still swallow normally, but I can only feel it on the right side. But I’m not cursing my body for it anymore, or fighting against it. Instead, it reminds me of what we’ve been through together.
Tonsils: gone. Bow: tied.
The bullet points:
I’m so sick of myself! So next week, we’re going to take a much needed break from my moody thoughts for the very first episode of the podcast! Lovingly titled “Bathroom Sink,” in homage to the imaginary podcast my Old College Pals Edie and Jonathan and myself always joked about starting. The first guest is my dear friend Ella Feldman, who is a delight to listen to and my gift to you in 7 days time.
Right now I’m super into that Thai baby hippo, Moo Deng, that is all over the internet. Baby animals usually don’t do it for me, but there’s something really good about that one.
Love you lots!
Ryley
