Or, in further defense of my mother.
As it turns out, Rachel was on the right side of history to object to the routine indiscriminate removal of children’s tonsils, as happened to her on the family kitchen table when she was young. In my memory this was done as a job lot with her siblings, but since the youngest of the six must have been a babe in arms at the time, if he existed at all, I may be wrong. Surely even the most bullish of (cowboy) surgeons wouldn’t be keen on performing both the surgery and the anaesthetic on an infant?
In any event, we were spared this fate. And if my brother was deaf for an indeterminate amount of time before it was picked up by routine surveillance testing at school, that’s what it’s for, isn’t it? And a pair of grommets (not sure if he got his tonsils and adenoids done at the same time?) fixed that up in a jiffy.
ps. I am feeling much better, thanks for asking. An anti inflammatory, an anti nausea pill, and a nap have fixed the headache, photophobia, and sick feeling right up. Almost.