Tyler = Tonsils = TIRED!

So if you haven't seen me in 2 years, I've been tired. Mostly because Tyler still doesn't really sleep through the night. We have been "struggling" with it but coping nonetheless still in love with little Tyler. We have also listened to plenty of advice, talked to the Doctor, and sometimes not taken all that seriously when we say Tyler is a horrible sleeper... (you know the "oh every kid is hard look")

Well a week or 2 ago, Jeremy was brushing Tyler's teeth and noticed out of the blue that Tyler's tonsils were really really big. He told me and I looked it up on the internet. I was thinking toddlers must just have big tonsils. Well as I googled the topic I was AMAZED! The descriptions of toddlers with large tonsils described Tyler to T!

Apparently when kids have big big tonsils, their airway gets blocked causing them to snore (Tyler snores BIG TIME). The lack of oxygen causes them to have sleep apnea which is when they stop breathing for a second then their brain kicks in and makes them breathe. The thing with this, is that they body never gets into the REM sleep which is the RESTFUL sleep and the kids end up exausted all the time and wake up all the time. This in turn causes them to be exausted during the day and sometimes act kind of spazztic ;) Oh and they also gets lots of ear infections etc (Tyler has had 4 or 5).

Another interesting note is that a lot of kids diagnosed with ADHD actually just have sleep apnea and are over-tired (Yes a couple people have asked me if I was planning on medicating Tyler when he was older!). I have never thought he had ADHD for the record.

Anyways, I'm on a soap box here.... We went to the specialist, the long and short of it is that Tyler needs a tonsillechtomy. The Doctor looked in his mouth and immediately said "YES, these are LARGE!". He actually figured they were by how Tyler was breathing, before he even LOOKED in his mouth. I'm borderline scared to death of this whole thing, but the risks of not doing the surgery are worse because the sleep apnea can wear on his heart (I don't know how exactly, it made sense when the Dr explained it though).

The Doctor said his sleeping will be much different. He'll go to sleep and wake up rested without waking up?!!!?!?!?!? That's still near unbelievable to me!