Adenoids produce antibodies, capture and destroy bacteria that is breathed in. As a person grows the body develops more sophisticated defenses and the adenoids shrink away by the age of 5 or 6.
Mine didn't. They apparently encountered more bacteria than they could handle, became infected, swelled up and in turn infected my tonsils. To have your tonsils and adenoids removed was and is not unusual. What was unusual in my case was that my adenoids grew back and became infected and swollen again. But it was awhile before this was discovered.
In retrospect analysis it was thought that their swelling had blocked the eustachian tubes to my ears which severly effected my hearing. All this was the apparent reason for my difficulties during the 4th and 5th grades of school.
I don't remember problems in school. It is hard to see a problem when you are inside of it and especially if you do not have the language to analize and articulate an experience.
But I do remember tremendous anxiety about school and I remember the stradegies I developed to cope: sickness. Later the infections in my adenoids would be blamed for the illnesses that caused me to miss so much school. Perhaps that was a partial cause and maybe those ill feelings were present, allowing me to capitalize on them. But I distinctly remember "thinking" myself sick. And like any hypochondriac I actually became physically ill.
Most often it was an upset stomach which would not have been difficult with the presence of anxiety. Perhaps it was a behavior I had learned from my father. In the early days of the auto parts stores he would leave early in the mornings to travel the Kentuky backroads up into the mountains making sales calls on the many independent grages and service stations. I remember those early hours, laying in bed and listening to him in the bathroom gagging and throwing up. But he always went out the door to work. Eventually he developed stomach ulcers.
The second operation to remove my adenoids seemed to remove my need to avoid school because I did enjoy the rest of my grade school experience. However, the avoidance-hypochondria syndrome stayed readily at hand for any anxiety producing confrontation, whether I really wanted to avoid it or not. It had become an automatic response. By the 8th grade I had developed my own stomach ulcers.
As a high school freshman I was walking across a gravel parking lot at the school when I felt a twinge of nausea. Suddenly I had an epiphany of what it was all about. I was tired of being sick, did not want to be sick and decided I didnot need to be sick. From that moment on I was not sick unless it was a genuine illness.