Emma Cowing: 'Plenty of tonsil-free people still suffer from tonsillitis'

Published on Tuesday 14 September 2010 17:58

S IX MONTHS ago I had my tonsils removed. I can't say I recommend the experience, unless unbelievable, gut-wrenching agony of the sort that makes waterboarding sound like a spa treatment is your sort of thing, in which case can I recommend the number of a good therapist?

There have, however, been two benefits to this painful extraction. First of all, I no longer get tonsillitis. This is not a given, apparently. Plenty of tonsil-free people still suffer from tonsillitis. It is the coalition government of medical procedures, promising one outcome and delivering another, then pretending that's what was meant to happen all along.

Anyway, having finally rid myself of these nasty interlopers — they were sent to Milton Keynes for what the NHS suspiciously referred to as "research" — my immune system has blossomed. Like a delicate flower after a long, hard winter, it has been mercifully revived, providing me with my second reason to be grateful for the whole traumatic experience: I haven't had a single cold since.

This is a big deal for me. Normally, no amount of echinacea can avert the mighty human rhinovirus from assaulting my nasal passages. My handbags pull double shifts as makeshift graveyards for half-wrapped cherry-flavoured Tunes, while somewhere outside Glasgow, seagulls are currently sifting through a landfill site made up of my old hankies.

Now, though, I am miraculously cold-free, a feat made even more impressive given that I am currently surrounded by people hellbent on re-enacting the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

It was a colleague who started the trend. Arriving in the office resembling death on a digestive, he coughed and spluttered his way through the working day like a 60-a-day smoker with a serious phlegm issue. Every so often I'd peer over and enquire as to his health, eventually, in a misguided attempt to help, rooting out a Lemsip packet from the back of my desk drawer, so old it has probably been awarded a place in the university clearing system.

The next day, having avoided several sneezing commuters on the train, I went to a concert with my mother, a woman so tough she makes Governor Arnie look like the wimpy one in Friends. Yet even she had succumbed to the inevitable, and spent most of the performance standing outside the balcony door trying not to cough at the quiet bits.

It is the change in season of course. The road from bare legs to opaque tights is paved with bad intentions and inappropriate footwear. Colds are a grim inevitability.

They say you're supposed to feed a cold and starve a fever. There are a number of reasons why I am opposed to this concept, not least because it's a load of old twaddle. Instead I shall simply wait it out, quietly hoping that my newly strengthened immune system can bear the brunt and stave off a snotty-nosed winter of discontent.

I'd bet my tonsils on it.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 19 September, 2010