In Tonsils, a Problem the Size of a Pea
By ELIZABETH SVOBODA Published: August 31, 2009 As a child, Meghan Swann had suffered several bouts of strep throat , and when she was a teenager, she thought she felt another one coming on. The main symptom was familiar — a dull sore-throat pain. But this time something was different; there seemed to be a foreign object stuck in the back of her throat, something she couldn’t quite swallow. “So I pushed on my tonsil, and something popped out,” Ms. Swann said. The yellowish object was about the size of a piece of gravel and had the sulfurous odor of bad breath . “I thought it was a piece of food or something,” she said. From then on, Ms. Swann, now 25 and living in the St. Louis area, engaged in a secret ritual: popping the mushrooming bits of debris out of her tonsils with a cotton swab whenever they got big enough to cause discomfort. One day, she mentioned her problem to her mother — and was surprised at the knowing response. Those squishy little things were tonsil stones, her mot...