Would appreciate some advice...I am caring for my fiance who had a tonsillectomy yesterday. This morning when he woke up, he was spitting out bright red blood, which stopped after about 5-10 minutes...is this normal so early on?? Has anyone else had this experience? I called the on-call physician, who said as long as it had stopped, it should be fine, but my fiance is complaining of feeling like he has fluid in his chest, and is worried that some of the blood may have gotten down in there. He frequently feels like he has to cough, and tries to suppress it as much as possible b/c he is scared it will start to bleed again. He has been taking his meds at the regular 4 hour intervals, and eating/drinking as much as he can manage. So far he has managed to stay hydrated, but I'm worried about the bleeding and the potential for more in the next day or so. He was clearing his throat a lot the first day (which I told him not to do) and the doctor thinks this may be what caused the bleeding. Since the episode, he has not tried clearing his throat anymore, and it seems like that's working, but I'm still nervous.
Re: Bleeding in first 24 hours after Tonsillectomy
I am on day 10 post tonsillectomy. I was told that any bleeding more than 2 table spoons at a time was not good.
I had to sleep sitting up so that any fluid did not come back up, he may want to consider that.
My worst pain started after day 5. The descabbing process took about 4 days so tell him to be patient and drink plenty of fuilds.
Re: Bleeding in first 24 hours after Tonsillectomy
Thanks for the info - he's not had any bleeding since. It wasn't a lot of blood and didn't last very long, but it gave us quite a scare. The doctor said if I had taken him to the ER they would have just put him on an IV and observed him for an hour. I'm glad I didn't rush him in right away!
So far, he's been tolerating the pain well and managing to get enough liquids, so that's good. Not looking forward to the descabbing process - it sounds like those will be some rough days...we're now in day 3, hoping by day 10 we'll be just about through all of this!!
