How long has it been? Over a year and the pandemic is still in our midst, its upper respiratory signatures worrying parents over a sniffle, a cough, an upset stomach … and rightly so.
Oh, for the days when you could just be sick without worry that it might be COVID 19 …
Like when I was a child.
Getting sick in our house was, well, normal. Once you went to school, or hung out with people who went to school, you got sick. And then your siblings got sick. So at any one time, Mom would be nursing four sloppy, often-nauseated, loose-boweled, unkempt, whiney, rash-covered kiddos.
We did have a bona fide doctor, Dr. Di Filippo, an able physician who made house calls, but a lot of what went on in our house when we were sick was more like folk medicine than treatments based on science.
Measles, Rubella , Mumps, Chicken Pox, assorted colds, etc. would have my mother setting up her mother’s nursing station on the top of her dresser so she could minister to all of her four sick kids. I should add, in the interest of complete transparency, that our bedrooms were on the second floor and the only bathroom was on the first floor. The bucket next to the dresser was also part of the nursing apparatus.
There did seem to be a focus on elimination as a bona fide therapy because, on that ersatz nurse’s station besides the bottle of peroxide for cuts and scrapes and a precious box of band aids, were the dreaded rectal thermometer and a bottle of Cascara, an evil, sweet-tasting liquid designed to remove the foul pathogens through your digestive system’s lower end. If that didn’t help, there was the even more frightening white porcelain-coated container and its red hose that hung over the toilet – the enema.
I also remember a bottle of Kaopectate on that dresser, the taste of which was indescribably awful. Chalk would have tasted better. Mom was the mystic who knew the steps of the dance that involved purging and halting the outflow of reverse peristalsis.
After all of the purging, whether generated by the illness or the Cascara-enema bag protocol, hydration became vital, and the remedy was Hoffman’s ginger ale. Hoffman’s ginger ale left out to lose its carbonation, that is. I guess carbonation was considered a detriment to healing. I should add that the ginger ale always warm first, because our refrigerator didn’t make ice, and secondly letting it stand open on the dresser was the method for eliminating the carbonation.
“Pop’s,” the little candy store at the corner of 55th and 3rd Avenue did a land office business in bottled ginger ale during winter ailment season.
Tea with milk and sugar and dry toast eaten on a bed tray were de rigueur for at least part of the Mom regime for better health, that is, until she pulled out the big gun – Vicks. Vicks was for our chests, and it didn’t matter what our ailment was – Vicks couldn’t hurt. That same panacea was added to a little pocket in the vaporizer to put a fog of menthol around the sickroom. Adding to what I guess we would call aromatherapy, she would hang eucalyptus leaves over our beds. There were even little bags of the crushed leaves to hang around our necks, over the area on our chests where she had rubbed the Vicks.
Even today, the smell of Vicks has a special meaning.
A cough? My mother had my grandmother’s homebrewed cough medicine made out of medical grade creosote and wild tart cherries. It would stop a cough or a bullet. It also contained a big modicum of spiritous liquors. You slept well after a draft of this tonic.
There were the odd times when only one of us came down with something. Then you were quarantined in the tiny room at the top of the stairs with absolutely nothing to do but sleep. The only diversion in that room was looking out the window to see the sky and the roof of the apartment building on 54th street. Mom might try to entertain you by allowing you to read the greeting cards that she had stashed away in her hope chest. But after that less than exciting interlude, you got better fast to overcome the sheer boredom.
All of these illnesses were childhood ailments, and, yes, they could have dire consequences, but for the most part, we all survived.
But … there was the time when my younger sister, Kathleen, began to hallucinate, telling my mother that the nuns from our school were sitting on the staircase, playing cards. Wow! Bring out the doctor, the aunts, the rosary beads and the priest! The diagnosis was polio, sort of. The delirium passed within a day, after which she broke out in a rash which was attributed to her eating strawberries the day before. She escaped the Cascara but was dutifully bedded in the isolation ward to be cured by ennui. (I thought I’d throw in a little French for my grandson, Will, who is studying French in school.)
When I was maybe 7 or 8, I was diagnosed with pneumonia. Pneumonia was a serious illness. Adults began to speak in hushed tones around my bed. There were references to movies where the family waited to see if the fever would break, meaning the crisis would pass. I remember my aunts who lived across the street coming to visit, standing around the bed, their rosaries in their hands, praying for me.
And, in that memory, I see the hero, Dr Di Filippo, with a syringe full of a new wonder drug, penicillin, only recently available for general use.
There was no waiting for the fever to break, to pass the crisis. I got better.
It was the prayers and the penicillin that saved little Ann, but not from continued ministrations from a so grateful mother who, for several days took my temperature every four hours and plied me with flat ginger ale and, when it was deemed that I was strong enough, to not only toast and sweet hot tea, but scrambled eggs while sitting at the table downstairs in the kitchen and in my father’s chair.
Thinking about this, we have learned first, that human connection, care that is given with love is a powerful therapy. We have also learned that believing in the strength of that therapy works. It’s called the placebo effect and, strangely, given how much we hated the proclivity to purge our intestinal flora and fauna, there is a body of research that says that our guts are responsible for our health… and that ginger is a very helpful remedy for stomach upset.
So far no one has said much about Vicks, except that it is in everyone’s medicine cabinet.
As they would say in Brooklyn, “Go figure.”
