Getting tonsils removed can lead to bleeding, pain and a lot of missed school days, but a new procedure lessens all of those possibilities.

Peyton Manna is a little bundle of energy. It's hard to believe that the tiny 3½-year-old used to snore like a lumberjack, reported WNBC-TV in New York.

"Peyton would be asleep in the bedroom with the door closed, and I could hear it and I would look at Kim in disbelief. I just couldn't believe that she was snoring so loudly," said Geoff Manna, Peyton's father.

The problem was Peyton's tonsils. They were so enlarged that she could barely breathe while sleeping, and it was affecting her during the day, too.

"She was cranky, she was exhausted -- in school, she wasn't necessarily able to focus all the time or really follow instructions at times," said Kim Manna, Peyton's mother.

The fix is removing the tonsils, but a typical tonsillectomy usually means a lot of pain for a child, and a week or 10 days of missed school. Plus, some kids have an episode of bleeding that may require a return to the operating room.

Now there's a better way.

"The idea of partial tonsillectomy is to remove almost all the tonsil tissue, but leave approximately 10 percent of the tissue not violating the muscle," said Dr. Max April, of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

It's called tonsil shaving. A mechanical device removes most of the tonsil without leaving raw muscle exposed. The only drawback is the possibility of the tonsil growing back later on, but a large study of nearly 900 kids who had tonsil shaving found a regrowth rate of just 0.5 percent.

"Again, their diet isn't altered because there really isn't that raw muscle, and leaving the 10 percent of that tonsil tissue allows the throat to work better and much less pain, and their diet is almost regular soon after surgery," April said.