Ever
get stitches? What happened?
Were
you ever hospitalized as a kid?
What
were some of the “old-fashioned” remedies for sickness that you
remember your parents using?
Well, I have told you about breaking the
window with my arm and the many stitches and re-stitching that had to be
done. I believe those were my only
stitches until Melissa was born and I needed a little sewing up.
I never broke any bones, or had my tonsils
out or other disasters of childhood. Of course, I never had a bike either, so
that eliminated one source of catastrophe.
I was never hospitalized, but I did go
through a period of very bad headaches when I was 11 or 12. I was pretty sure
it was a brain tumor, thanks to a Reader’s Digest article. I had Mono in 7th
grade, and then pneumonia just before 9th grade. I got lab tests and x-rays for the headaches,
and a work-up for the Mono, but I was treated for everything in the clinic and
at home.
I had a lot of nosebleeds as a kid,
and my mom could get pretty freaked out about that, but she would call my Uncle
Sam on the phone. Once he even came over to the apartment late at night to
check it out, but it was just a regular little-kid nosebleed.
Back then, we got chicken pox,
measles, mumps, scarlet fever (whatever that is). Chicken pox the remedy was
baths. Measles and mumps were treated with aspirin (yes! Before Reyes syndrome
was known) and a darkened room. Since the only room with heavy, room-darkening
drapes was our parents’ bedroom, we would get to stay in there during the day.
One thing for sure, when we were sick,
it was mom who took care of us. My dad
only had to hear someone vomiting to trigger his own nausea and vomiting.
We didn’t own a TV for several years,
but there was this repair place that rented TVs for $1 / day, and when we were
really sick with a major disease, or when my dad got surgery, we would get to
have a TV for a week, a very old-fashioned remedy, indeed!
Other remedies:
Baking soda and water paste on bee
stings or wasp stings
A liquid called Campho-phenique for
chiggers and mosquito bites
Vicks on your throat for a cold or
sore throat
A hot match-tip on a tick to make him
back out
clear nail-polish on a tick to kill
him without leaving his claws in you
Calamine lotion for poison ivy and
heat rash
I can see as I look over this list
that many of the common things were
flora and fauna – And things you kids did not grow up with in St.
George—chiggers, poison ivy.
My
mom was pretty advanced, read a lot and had smart friends, so she didn’t do
anything superstitious or weird. She had a sister (Mary) who was an RN and both
her brothers were doctors who lived at home while they were students, so she
absorbed a lot of smart things from that.
We were a sturdy lot and enjoyed good
health, for the most part.
Addendum
Small
scrapes and cuts were treated with one of these antiseptics:
Tincture
of merthiolate or mercurochrome.
They
were two different things, applied with a dropper. The glass dropper was not a
bulb / suction medicine dropper but rather a solid glass tube with a solid
glass sphere on the tip, which would collect a small amount of liquid from the
bottle which could then be applied to the wound. It was used as an
antiseptic, and painted a red badge of courage on your knee or the palms of
your hands scraped in a fall. As I recall, Merthiolate stung but mercurochrome
did not. It was thought that the stinging medicine worked better, but
that may have been a fiction based on a temporary household depletion of
the non-stinging potion.
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