Post tonsillectomy / adenoidectomy night terrors

[neversplitapole]

Help!
my 7 year old has his tonsils and adenoids removed on Tuesday (6 days ago)

since then he has been waking 8/9/10 times a night having night terrors and sweating terribly

this was never mentioned by any of the healthcare professionals as a possibly side effect. He was on morphine for a few days and I assumed maybe this was a side effect of that. However he has stopped taking this now and yet the night terrors have continued

has anyone else experienced this? Or does anyone know of this is a common things post surgery for children?

thanks for any help / support you can give 😥

Paediatric nurse on an ENT ward. I've not heard of that happening. Could it be that he was scared of the procedure. And that's affecting him. If he had it for sleep aponea. It could be that he was always prone to them. But is now getting better quality sleep, therefore he's now getting them. (No idea if that's possible)

He must have been quite poorly if he was on morphine for so long. My DD had this surgery and was on paracetamol for a couple of days. However, my DF had night terrors after a few days on morphine.

Yes it's normal for after surgery. My 11 year old has had 25 operations and I am on a facebook page for his condition. There are lots of posts on the group about babies being more clingy/upset after operations and older children having nightmares, it's really common. It's mostly caused by the trauma but morphine will also cause a reaction like that.

Thanks so much for your reply.

he has different with night terrors in the past but nothing like this and he hasn’t had them for about 6 months. He seems so disturbed at night and it’s very hard to calm and settle him.

he wasn’t overly concerned before the operation but maybe this is anxiety. His voice is quite different which is worrying him and he’s not eating very much but other than that he’s happy enough in himself during the day. It’s just night time that is horrendous which then has a knock on impact as he’s so tired.

im just not sure what I can do to help him

He was given morphine for day 3/4/5 as I think that’s meant to be the worse days.

thanks for your reply

Thanks so much. That’s really reassuring to hear as my GP was surprised and couldn’t really advise if this was normal or not and it wasn’t mentioned as being a possible side effect.

do you happen to know if there’s anything I can do to help make this easier? Or is it just something we have to ride out and it will improve on its own?

It's caused by the trauma. There's not a lot you can do really, just ride it out. He should be a lot better in a couple of weeks. My son when he was about your son's age found books/tv programmes about children in hospital helpful.