Most of my health care as a young child was provided by public clinics. And most of it consisted of being immunized. Well-child visits, if they existed somewhere in the mid-1940s, were not a line in the Family Flom’s budget.
At Warrington Elementary School it went like this. Notices were sent out to parents that a certain upcoming day was immunization day. They were asked to sign permission slips for their kids and that was it. There were no information sheets about what was to be expected in terms of benefits or discussion of possible adverse consequences.
No one needed a reminder of the “why,” only information about the “how.” The only routine immunization available was the DPT (diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough). Everyone knew what whooping cough sounded like, and every family tree had people in it who had died from the other two illnesses. The threats were immediate and known. Easy for parents to choose. No anti-vaccine movement back then. Not when these diseases were of more than historical interest.
For the kids, however, it was another matter. We knew that “shot day” was coming and our rumor mills went into high gear. Large syringes with barrels the size of cucumbers were described, with needles as long as #2 pencils. And the needles were blunt on the ends from years and years of hard use to the point where they had to be “shoved in” with great force by strong-armed nurses.
If you were getting your first set of doses, why, you were the lucky ones. It was the older children who were scheduled for that acme of pain, that Mt. Everest of suffering – the booster shot. It was well known among fifth-graders and above that the survival rate from such immunizations was quite poor. “Remember Junior Smith last year … they told us he moved away … not true. It was from the booster shot!”
Then the day came and we all lined up by home rooms in the hallways, filing past white-garbed nursing personnel from the county health department. The closer your place in the line got to the nursing station the higher the incidence of sniffling and trembling. Some children were sobbing quietly to themselves as they accepted the fact that these were probably their last moments on earth and they were doing the very best that a second-grader can do when confronted with their own mortality.
And then it was over for you, and you walked three steps forward into the sunlight of a brand new day, a day filled with joyful promise … until you saw a trickle of blood going down the arm of the kid in front of you in line and you fainted dead away. Just dropped to the wooden floor and had to be carried to a sturdy steel cot for recovery.
But the good news is, that after beating such odds, one became invincible.
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Watched the movie on Netflix: Trial of the Chicago 7. For the most part we enjoyed it, and I gave it a 4 Eyeball score (out of 5). This is a rating of whether the film kept me awake or not, and although this movie was not 100% successful, it did pretty well. The original trial was an amazing piece of theater in itself, and this movie brings us in on quite a bit of that.
The chanting in the background of some scenes of the phrase “The whole world is watching!” would be perfectly appropriate at todays rallies and protests. The whole world has been watching, and has been dismayed by our behavior. They thought better of us … so did we.
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From The New Yorker
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Wednesday morning I had a cataract removed from my right eye. The left one was done a couple of years ago. Because of my recent hospital adventures, the anesthesiologist preferred that I not be sedated, and in spite of my tears, pleading, and threatening to hold my breath until I passed out, that’s how we did it. And it went okay. It got a little creepy as the doctor narrated the procedure while I was fully conscious.
I’m going to be cutting a hole in your eyeball now, and jerking out the bad lens. After that I will shove this piece of plastic into the space where the old lens used to be, and I am crossing my fingers that it will fit. Don’t worry, it almost always does, but if you have unbearable pain in the next few hours, give the guy on call a ring and tell him your story. There’s nothing he can do, really, but whining about it might make you feel better. So here goes nothing … don’t move, don’t move, whatever you do … oops … what the … never mind. **
I’ll be glad to have that eye back in the lineup. I’ve been basically working with monocular vision for about 9 months.
**Never happened. It is my feverish interpretation of what was said. All of the surgical center personnel were very professional and exceedingly pleasant.
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The Lincoln Project has provided an interesting sidebar to this political season. Some of the videos have been more dramatic, but I think that this is my favorite.
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I think that Stephen Colbert is one of the smartest comedians working today. This clip, taken from one of this week’s shows, is comedy going so deep that it choked me up. Just like Colonel Kurtz said all those years ago … the horror … the horror.
Little Home In The Valley 