Tonsil stones

I finally found it!

Today I coughed up a nasty, odorous, white substance from the back of my mouth that has been coming from out of there for about 8 years. I've always called it "white shit". In the past I had tried searching on the internet for what it might be but to no avail. How do you search for something like that, anyway? I thought I was one of about 9 people in the world suffering from this obscure oddity. Today, however, I was going to stop at nothing to find out what the hell those little pieces of cheese were. The magic words on Google were "white stuff from mouth smells bad".

Oh damn! People on forums were posting their horror stories about it as well. But no one seemed to know what it was until I read the word "tonsillolith". I googled it and my life thereafter changed (this was a few hours ago).

The first thing I found was a Wikipedia article on tonsollilth a.k.a. tonsil stones. HOLY SHIT!!! A picture of my white shit on the internet!



As you can imagine, I was ecstatic. I read the entire article and googled some more and here's what I discovered.

But first, I'll brief you on what these mushy little things are and how I got them in the first place. I can still remember it: in 8th grade I noticed a long white strip in the middle of the back of my mouth. I ignored it. A few days later while I was drinking my daily iced tea in the school cafeteria, I accidentally swallowed it. I felt something rubbery slide down my throat but I still didn't seem to care that much. It was just something that comes and goes, I thought.

I don't remember how long it was after that but while I was doing my homework one sunny afternoon (it was graphing homework, by the way), I sneezed something that looked like the ball in the picture above. I didn't even hark back to the time I swallowed something weird in the cafeteria - I almost totally forgot about that incident. Actually, even after the sneeze, I really didn't mind or even wanted to look into it. That is, until it happened approximately every month. (Years later, I joked to friends that it happened every 28 days. They looked at me like I was from another planet.)

Now, I'm not one to go to the doctor; I believe you should stick it out until you're teetering on the point of death - at which point you'll squander away your life savings for something that could have been cured and for much cheaper had you gone to the doctor earlier. But I don't care. I let it go for 8 more years and I'm glad I did because it turns out that the tiny stinkballs are harmless. Whew!

And I can't believe they have two whole sites dedicated to this.

Dr. Douglass Hoffman, an ENT specialist who graduated from Stanford, put it this way:

The surface of your tonsils is pockmarked with deep pits, appropriately called "crypts" (since dead stuff accumulates in these pits). Oral mucosa lines the crypts. As this mucosa sheds, normally the dead cells leave the crypts and are swallowed. In some unlucky people...the dead cells accumulate and glom together to form hard little balls. All of this dead stuff makes great food for bacteria, and all kinds of bacteria normally colonize the mouth. Consequently, the [tonsilloliths] are ripe with bacteria. This accounts for the smell.

And yes, the period before the white shit comes out, I have horrible halitosis. To describe what the stones smell like, go to the bathroom, take a shit, and smell it. This is only a small exaggeration of what to expect if someone dared you to put one of those globs to your nose. And here is a video of one that is probably a little big but is not unusual to people with tonsil stones. This guy needs to seriously wash his hand with burning hot water and soap for about a minute and a half.



And here's a guy excavating.



If you have this don't be surprised to go to the doctor and find out that they have no clue what is wrong with you. Doctors are stupid. You go to their office and they give you an antibiotic that may or may not work. It's their way of saying, "I don't know. Take this and come back when you have something I know about. Then I'll look smart." Most of the tonsil stone sufferers who posted on blogs and forums went to their doctors and encountered the same thing. But thanks to the internet, people with similar troubles can share their stories and a real doctor comes by to answer their questions. And that doesn't solely apply to disorders, either. Just google something you have in mind and you can learn something new. Hence, this blog.