Reminiscence: Child Health Problems

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1

Was I a sickly child? I think so. I believe my mother thought so too, based on how she looked after me in the later years, in periods of which my memories now are sharper than of the earlier times. For example, I don’t remember much about having asthma as a toddler, but I do recollect that episode’s being recalled to me enough times later. “You don’t want to make your asthma come back, you know, ‘Byron’.” And that kind of thing.

And I also remember my sister’s getting the chicken pox, and then my getting them, and the two of us both at home all day. Soon, we had the measles. I think she got well after a fairly short time, but while I was still weakly recovering from this run of bad luck, I came down with a chest flu… which eventually developed into pneumonia. More on that later.

Our children’s doctor was Dr. M--------, not to be confused with my parents’ doctor who went by the nickname “Dr. Happy.” (It seemed appropriate.) All of this was in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

To a little boy, Dr. M-------- seemed a big man, even taller and rounder than my Dad, who was 6 feet tall and weighed about 175 pounds. Dr. M-------- had a hearty manner and talked what seemed loud to me. Mother and Dad had a lot of confidence in him, and remarked that he was right on top of all the new developments. I have thought later, for instance, that he might have been one of the first generation of family doctors and pediatricians who never made house calls.

Mother would have to drag me out of my nice, comfy, warm bed, stuff me into itchy and too-warm clothes, help me stagger down the stairs and climb stiffly into the family car, before driving me down to the shady-lawned, pleasant new office that looked like a house and was in a residential neighborhood… and then cuddle me and talk sweetly to me – amid the soft gurgle of the aquarium - until Dr. M-------- was able to squeeze me in between two of his scheduled appointments. There always seemed to be several Moms and children awaiting their turn.

When we were all done and getting up to leave, Dr. M-------- always held out a candy cane to “such a good patient.” Then when I would reach for it, he would abruptly shift it just enough to one side so I couldn’t touch it. After I’d make another stab at it, he would laugh cheerily and give it to me: “There you go, sport,” he would say. I guess my Mother let me keep the candy, but I don’t recall eating it.

2

Central Texas is well-known as a center of pollen allergies, and that certainly applied to me. I suppose that was the cause of the asthma troubles early on, and “hay fever” symptoms dogged me all through childhood right up until college, when I wasn’t even in Texas anymore. Many were the bottles of brown glass from which I had teaspoonfuls of red, sweet Benadryl. Boy, did I feel sluggish and sleepy then, but the worst of the sneezing, sniffling, and itchy eyes did seem to be much better. Many too were the times when Mother would drive me to visit the aquarium and the other Moms and sick children so that Dr. M-------- could give me a shot in the bottom.

When I had my pants down and was bending over a little chair, Dr. M-------- always followed the same routine. He’d say, “Now I want you to tell me when I give you this shot.” I’d get ready. Then he would slap my poor little behind and plunge the needle in. When he would pull the needle out and wipe the spot with a cotton ball with alcohol in it, he would say, “See? I told you you wouldn’t be able to feel it!”

He was very disappointed when I would say, “Now!” just as he stuck me. I knew after one or two little visits like this that as soon as he slapped my bottom he was going to strike, so even though I certainly did not feel the needle, I timed my cry perfectly every time. As a reward for getting it right, guess what? I got a candy cane! Dr. M-------- seemed impressed when instead of reaching for the candy cane, so that he could snatch it away from my grasp, I would reach for his hand and take the candy with my other hand. How dumb did he think I was? I wondered. After all, I had dozens of shots like this over the years. His routine never varied.

3

One day Mother picked me up at school. My older sister was already in the car, picked up at her school. This was in the 1950s. We went to Dr. M--------’s office I think four days in a row. First she would go in, and then when she came out I would go in. In other visits when both of us went to the doctor, we both went in together. So right away we knew this was special.

When she came out, my sister’s eyes were red as though she had been crying. That was sufficiently scary. In an office with a gurney, where I had not been before, the nurse explained that we were starting a new treatment that would prevent my getting sick so much, with all that sneezing and itchy eyes. I was thinking at that moment that maybe the slaps on my bottom weren’t so bad…

I got up on the gurney and lay flat on my back. A small cushion was placed under my shoulders so that my neck could be tilted back. The room seemed a little cool. I remember it now as being sort of dark too, but that may be because I had my eyes shut… tight.

With Mother holding my hand, the nurse and for a brief part of the visit Dr. M-------- (uncharacteristically soft-spoken, I thought), they explained sympathetically that I was going to get a special, new treatment, the very latest thing for a little boy with my allergies. It would take a few minutes, while I would need to lie there very still until the treatment was over. I should keep my eyes shut too.

It was called a radium treatment. When I was properly positioned and had my eyes sufficiently closed (that part was no problem), something thin and cold was inserted up my nose, it seemed like a foot or more, in any case farther than I had thought my nose went! Then I had to just lie there, very still, breathing through my mouth until after what must have actually been three to five minutes – not the eternity I thought it was – when the long needle-like rod was slowly removed.

I was surprised that it didn’t hurt. But boy, was it obnoxious. Waiting outside for the third and especially the fourth of those treatments was even worse than the treatment itself.

No candy either. I didn’t mind. At least it was over.

I know now that the purpose of this treatment was to shrink the adenoids, which were thought to play an important role in sinus trouble and hay fever symptoms. And I did seem somewhat better afterwards. And unlike many of us who had the radioactive radium treatment as children, thank goodness I have never had any hint of thyroid cancer.

4

At Boy Scout camp one summer, I was exposed to polio.

In my generation children were still vulnerable to polio, and we all knew that the best outcome of really having polio would be some kind of paralysis. You’d have to walk with crutches and braces. And you might have to spend the rest of your life in a big old tube, an “iron lung,” that breathed for you. We knew all this and didn’t talk of it, tried not to think of it, and did not actually think about it very often.

It had been hard for me to adjust to Boy Scout Camp. I had trouble sleeping that first night on my top bunk in a big tent with five other boys, but I was really enjoying the knot-tying, the lanyard-making, the search for arrow heads, and the lessons about the various kinds of tree leaves all around the campground. And then, it was all interrupted and suddenly we were going back home. I was taken right to a special doctor – could it have been Dr. Happy himself? – for a really big shot, in a really big needle. It was something called gamma-globulin, and they had to figure the dosage very carefully based on my exact current weight.

We heard that one of the other boys in the camp had been diagnosed with polio, not someone I knew. We never knew what happened to him.

I do remember that one boy whom I did know well from school, a popular guy who was really good at football and baseball, came down with polio. He was said to be scared; who wouldn’t be? But after a time, they said he was all right. I don’t know or recall whether the diagnosis had been wrong or if he had just managed to throw it off, but he wasn’t the only one who was scared during that time. I remember that.

5

But my sharpest memory of health issues in my childhood goes back to that bout with pneumonia. It remains clear and distinct in my mind, as though it just happened.

This was when I was four, I am pretty sure. My bedroom was at the top of the stairs, just a little to the left. I slept in an apparatus which at one time had been my baby bed, a white iron contraption that was designed to "grow up" with the youngster until he or she was just too big to fit.

In other words, it was high off the floor like a baby bed and at one time had had a fence all around it high enough to keep the baby inside. You could unlatch the one side of it and swing it down to pick up the infant rather than having to reach down in and lift him (me) out all the way up to what have been shoulder high for my little Mother to get me out. The fence had been taken off, all the way around so that it was by then just like a real bed except for being rather high off the floor and kind of small.

When I was sick that time, my little bed was positioned just to the left of the doorway, with my head and pillow nearest the back wall and my feet toward the doorway and the stairs.

What I remember so clearly was late in the afternoon of one long day when I had been feeling rotten. Headache, fever, sleepiness (probably drugged), and worst of all, subject to sharp, stabbing pains in my chest whenever I moved… at all, even when I tried to talk... or whisper.

I had been asleep, again, late that afternoon, lying on my side with my face toward the window on the side wall and my back toward the center of the room, which was fairly large and open. I heard a familiar sound. It was my Dad. He had just gotten home from work, coming through the kitchen door alongside the house, greeting Mother making supper, trudging across the dining room below mine, ready to start up the stairs.

I knew he was worried about me, and I loved my Dad. He was going to stump, step by step, up the stairs and proceed into my room where it would look like I was sleeping, with my back to him. Dad was the kind of person who might touch your arm when he was talking with you, or would put his hand on the shoulder of his little boy when standing next to him, or even tousle his hair affectionately.

In other words, I knew that he was going to put his big, warm hand on my shoulder or my head as I lay there… to communicate his love and his concern, maybe even without waking me up.

And I knew that when he did, my whole little body would be wracked with an awful, piercing pain.

To be honest, what I remember is not his actually doing this and my agony as a result. What I remember so clearly is being torn between my wish to be loved at that painful time and my fear of the sharp stab of that awful pneumonia pain.

I'm not even sure that, if I had felt sure I could speak without sparking the pains, I would have told Dad not to touch me. I wanted him to touch my back and the back of my head... And I also wanted to be free of pain.

It's funny what you remember and what you don't, isn't it?

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