BusyBeeBen

Dentist here. The uvula is used to help close off the opening to the nose from the throat side - the nasopharynx - during swallowing and chewing. It also helps with some phonation, mostly for some hard consonants, but there should be minimal speech pattern effect with a minor procedure like this. In cases of cleft lip and palate, hypernasal speech occurs because the uvula cannot contact the throat to create proper sound and prevent air escape through the nose. This is called velopharyngeal insufficiency.

In OP's case I'm betting the uvula was elongated from a long history of apnic events and possibly genetic predisposition.

Good luck on your recovery, OP!

Nice! I work in the medical district in Chicago. Will it be one of the big three hospitals downtown in that area? If so, check out the italian street festival in that area from August 14-17.

What are your thoughts on my theory that exorbitant student debt (especially the kind achieved by going to medical or dental school), is, in turn, creating a health-care affordability crisis in the US? Since I am a dentist, I will explain it from that standpoint, although I am sure that my same rationale can apply for all other health fields encumbered by huge debt. New dental school graduates rack up hundreds of thousands of debt, more so if they choose to specialize in multi-year, unpaid residency programs. For example, my debt upon graduation was nearly $500,000. This debt has to be paid off in a sensible manner, but with more and more people seeking dental care, and debt getting higher and higher, we see a huge increase in the prices of dental healthcare. Many people simply cannot afford the current prices of dental care, which leads to them avoiding going to dentists, and waiting for emergencies. Emergencies are more often than not taken care of in the hospital, driving up costs for hospitals, and costing states lots of money if the patients do not have private insurance. This, of course, leads to the expansion of corporate dental offices, which leads to typically poor oral care, and leads to dentists either being forced to slash prices to compete with corporate practices, or close down and join them. This makes our level of healthcare decrease to barely-acceptable standards, slows down the economy in at least one sector because fewer people can earn decent enough money to spend it after attempting to pay off crippling debt, and allows health-care providers to get paid less to do more, which only makes debt worse. I know that this is caused by bloated tuitions, which primarily go to pad the fat pockets of the administrators in dental schools, and unfortunately, with state-support getting smaller and smaller across the US, tuitions keep going up - in part to keep schools open because of the service they provide for the community, and in part to keep administrators employed because they enjoy taking home big paychecks. It's a very sad cycle when the people trained to treat the population and care for its physical and emotional woes are unable to do so at an acceptable level of care, and even worse when these same people (who want only to help others) are unable to do so after many years of expensive training and find themselves in crippling, unpayable debt. This same crippling debt either drives us to do worse work in less time to earn more on that time, or charge much, much more for the same work done.