After going to hell for a long conversation with the devil, the ice bed began bringing my temperature down. It lasted for what seemed like eternity during those first seven days in the Contagious Disease Hospital. When the fever finally dropped, I began to notice strange things all around me. The rooms and hallways are separated from each other by windowed walls. A huge, beige colored tank with glass port holes stood in the hall along the window outside my room. What is it, I wondered? I never asked, but later learned that it had my name on it.
A few months ago I asked my brother Bill to tell me about the death of our older brother Joe. Since I wasn’t born when Joe died, the details of his story escaped me. Brother Joe died at age seven of scarlet fever in the same hospital. Wow! It finally dawned on me. Here I am at age 64 finally realizing the agony that Mom and Dad must have gone through when they took me, their second son named Joe, to the same hospital where their first born son died. They earned their way into heaven with the suffering and mental anguish. I apologize, Mom and Dad, for having put you through that horrible wringer again.
After the ice-mattress, the doctors invented a new torture. Two aides came in and raised the foot of my bed with blocks. Now, I had to lay there with my head down, and my feet up in the air, and my arm tied.
The IV-line in my hand blocked, and it needed to be moved. A doctor came and started doing something to my leg. The next thing I knew, the tube was in my ankle. He cut my ankle open to find the vein and inserted the tube down there. The nurses referred to that as a ‘cut-down’. They tied my leg to keep me from pulling it out.
Time slowed to a crawl in that fish tank of a room at CDH. An hour seemed like a day, a day like a week, and a week like a month. Still, all I could think about was getting out in time for tryouts. The start of a new school year drew closer, and I realized it would take time to regain my strength from being in the hospital.
Once the fever subsided I felt much better and more mentally aware of the surroundings. When a doctor came in, I asked, “When will I go home?”
“Soon,” they replied. That is not the answer I wanted to hear.
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Filed under: Biography, family, health care, Jun-e-or, Memories, religion | Tagged: Burnside, Chicago, Conditions and Diseases, health, Hospital, Mendel CHS, Mom and Dad, Polio, Scarlet fever | Leave a comment »
