Hospitals

Hospitals


I was fairly lucky growing up in the 50's insofar as hospitalizations were concerned.  There were a lot of things that could put you in the hospital.  Al Botcher's brother had a young daughter who contracted something dreadful like tuberculosis and had to live in a sanitarium somewhere in central Minnesota. 

We visited her there one time and it was like a prison.  She was an inmate living in the place so as not to infect others, much like we are today because of the Wuhan virus, only much worse in her case.

We visited the grounds of the sanitarium and she could come out and sit on a little stone bench and talk to her mom and dad and siblings.  They brought her gifts, of course, but you could see the dread in their faces and the strain the situation put them under, especially when it came time to leave.  I was appalled.

My first visit was to have my tonsils removed, a minor bummer compared to what the Botcher girl was going through, but a bummer nonetheless.  My tonsils were so enlarged and infected that I was practically choking on them. 

I got checked into the hospital in La Crosse and they put me in a gown that laced up in back and made me comfortable in a bed.  I lay there for a few hours while they accumulated data about me and did tests.  Then came the dreaded moment when all these people rolled a gurney into the room and lifted me up on it.

They were smiling and saying comforting things designed to calm me down, which of course had just the opposite effect because I knew they were just blowing sunshine at me.  We rolled into the elevator, out the elevator, down a few hallways and through these double doors into the operating room, which looked like they place they might take you for the electric chair.

A nurse put a needle into my arm which was hooked up to a long tube up to a floppy little bottle hanging from a hook.  A plastic vial in the line showed a slow drip, drip, drip, as something was going into the tube and into my arm through the needle.

There was quite a large light overhead and a doctor stood above my head, almost out of view, with a mask over his face.  He asked me a few stupid questions which I knew were designed to relax me.  Then he took another little transparent hose and, with a needle, hooked it into the hose that was dripping stuff into me.  I nervously asked what it was and the nurse told me it was sodium pentathol.

I watched the new color travel down the little tube and precisely when it reached the needle going into my arm, it was like someone clobbered me over the head with a sledge hammer.  It was as if the entire room and it occupants were suddenly scrunched into a black snowball, and I spun over and down into a dark, dark abyss.

I awoke with the most painful throat imaginable and a pukey taste in my mouth, which I soon realized was dried and semi-coagulated blood.  I couldn't swallow because of the intense soreness. 

It was now that I learned that I could have ice cream to sooth.  I tried a little and managed to swallow it.  In a couple hours, I was eating more ice cream and drinking 7-up through a straw in little tiny bursts. 

The situation improved and I think by the next day I was able to go home and continue the ice cream and 7-up diet in bed for a couple days.

A couple years later I had my second hospital stay.  I had become lethargic and feverish and my mother and Al had taken me in for a strep test.  I didn't have strep so they took some other tests and nobody could figure out what was wrong, so they recommended that I enter the hospital so they could find out.

This time I was put in a room on the second floor of an old hospital, called Grandview, in La Crosse.  Many years later I would actually attend a college class in this building, which was one half block from the Main Hall of La Crosse State University.

I lay there for a few days while they took swabs of my throat and sinuses and blood tests.  Then, while my mom was visiting, the doctor came into the room and announced that they had not been able to figure out what I had.  He said that it could very well be an unknown virus and recommended that I have a spinal tap.  It was scheduled for the next day.

I worried all night about this spinal tap, because I could overhear the doctor telling my mother what it was and she was all hysterical, as she tended to be in crisis situations.  My mother didn't drive, because pulling her foot off the accelerator and onto the brake amounted to a crisis situation and she reacted hysterically and without finesse, almost squashing a man between the car she was learning in and his parked car.  The driving school instructor intervened at the last minute and saved the situation, proclaiming afterward that she was unteachable.

The next day a nurse came and told me what the spinal tap would be like.  They would fold me over so my head touched my knees and put a little, itty-bitty needle into my spine and suck out a tiny bit of fluid to analyze. 

Then the doctor came in.  He looked me over carefully, then removed the gown down to my waist.

"Better get three or four more people to help hold him down,"  he commented.  "Otherwise he's going to be jumping and thrashing all over the place."

That calmed me down immeasurably.  I began to weep in fear.

More people arrived and folded my quivering body in half, pinning me down against the gurney.

The doctor stuck the needle in and I'll bet it wasn't that "itty-bitty", but it didn't actually hurt and I didn't thrash around at all.  After a bit he said "OK, done." and I breathed a sigh of relief. 

Then the nurse touched the spot with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol and I almost jumped off the gurney.

They never did figure out what virus I had and after a few more days I got better and went home.  Next thing you knew, I was back in school and the whole thing was forgotten.