Tonsils and adenoids out- operation

[adrianna22]

DS has been diagnosed with sleep apnea .

He will be having his tonsils and adenoids out. I was not expecting that at all.

Should he go through the procedure, should we wait? He is only 4.

I'm worried how the op would effect his speech development.

What if the general anasetic (sp) may contribute to slight brain damage.

DS2 had his done aged 5 and if anything his speech improved as before he could only breathe through his mouth previously

DS 7 has obstructive sleep apnea too but because of his age the consultant wants to wait for a bit longer to see if his tonsils shrink naturally as they normally do when children are around 7 years old. I'm happy to wait.

In your DS' case I don't think disrupted sleep can do him any good. He is probably exhausted .He is too young to wait for the tonsils to naturally go down. Doctors are quite reluctant nowadays to go through the procedure unless strictly necessary. There are obviously risks to any sort of surgical procedure but in this case there are quite rare.

General anaesthetics nowadays are much safer than when I had this procedure myself donkeys years ago. I remember being sick for ages afterwards. My DS had a procedure under GA last month and he was eating a full lunch just 2 hours after coming round!!

I had the tonsils and adenoids removed for a very different reason to your DS but one noticeable effect was that my voice changed completely. I had a very deep husky voice for a 5 year old before op and went to a completely typical girly voice post operation. My brothers and sisters couldn't stop laughing for ages because of this!

I'm afraid I haven't got any knowledge of speech development related to this procedure.

Sorry, pressed post to early.
DS' speech is hyponasal because of the enlarged glands, but we had been told if he had the procedure his speech would improve.

My DD had obstructive sleep apnoea and had her tonsils out last summer aged 2.9m. If the reasons cited are due to sleep apnoea, it would be a good idea to have them whipped out as generally this is going to contribute to a better (and slightly safer) quality of sleep. I spoke at length about it with our paed, as DD also has some health conditions which labelled her as "higher risk" to operate on, and he said that in connection to a GA, there was a greater risk of post-surgical bleeding than anything going wrong with a GA. That isn't to say they can give you 100% gurantees, but as he put it, he had been routinely anaesthetizing even the most high risk children for donkeys years and not yet had a serious case. You might find for the first week/two weeks speech (or sounds; DD was non verbal at the time) is a bit slurred but after that was when DDs speech finally started coming through although prob coinicdence.

One thing I would say is stock up on paracetomal and ibuprofen and alternate them religiously for 10 days! Recovery can be a smidge unpleasant. That said, I have absolutely no regrets about them coming up. I used to hear DD's pauses in breathing whilst she slept sometimes and they terrified me.

My DS had Sleep apnoea too and had his operation at aged 7. It was totally successful. As Tambaboy said, apnoea really effects the quality of sleep. I am sure you will see a marked improvement once your DC has had the proceedure. My DS has ADD and some language issues.

Good Luck

dd had this op done about 2 months ago for mixed sleep apnoea. Her OSA is completely cured, she is like a different child. GA is scarier for the parent and due to dds low muscle tone a bit tricky but everything went well. She still has sleep apnoea because of her muscle tone and will be starting on cpap soon but I am hopeful that this will be the making of her.

It's hard to see how much osa effects the child until it is fixed. Tantrums are better, eating well, willing to do physio and not falling asleep at nursery.

I hope the op goes well

I meant to add we didn't really get any option, we were kept in hospital until the surgery was done following a disastrous sleep study ( prolonged desats in the 50's)

Although she still has issues desats don't go much below 80.

Thanks everyone. I feel relived now. Does anyone know about the waiting times for the operation as I would prefer if DS had the operation before school starts.

Phone the consultant's secretary and ask them. If you want to speed things up tell them you are available at short notice if they happen to have a cancellation.