24 May 2009
Haynes Memorial Hospital During the Epidemic
05/25/09 15:44
Haynes Memorial Hospital in Boston’s sweltering summer of 1953 does not give me fighting memories like those of Children’s Hospital. The facility my aunt carried my unprotesting self into was without air conditioning or any means of circulating the heavy, humid, stinking August air. Every corridor was jammed with occupied gurneys. Iron lung machines wheezed like submarines from a Jules Verne nightmare, attendants shoved their way through the clutter, administering shots, giving sips of water, checking the responses of silent patients in the big metal canisters. Walls tiled in dismal colors added no cheer. My main recollection is of being dropped onto a metal table and rolled onto my side, while somebody poked a large needle into my back for a spinal tap.
“Polio, it’s another polio.”
Then I passed out for most of the next two weeks. Fleeting recollections show arguing nurses trying to wrap my motionless body in hot, wet woolen blankets -- the infamous “Sister Kenny” treatment for polio victims. On top of the sauna from Mother Nature, it’s a wonder that more of us didn’t die of this treatment. I was paralyzed from head to toe during that two week period. Violent pain raged through my body during the few lucid moments, and because the overworked staff had little time for niceties, I somewhat bore with the scratchy wool. There was no way to tell them how badly it made me itch in addition to the other indignities. Somebody exclaimed, “Jesus, she’s crying again!”
At last I began to awaken, discovering that my fingers were able to move... Then my arms... My head would turn again... Nothing else. I dozed off until a shaking of my bed awakened me to the sight of my father sitting by my feet. His curly haired head was bowed, his hand over his eyes, and he was sobbing like a little boy. “What’s the matter, Daddy?” said I.
“My teeth hurt,” he said. “I’ve got some cavities.”
A young doctor slipped through the curtains, holding a chart. “Very likely this is it,” he addressed my father. “What’s come back by now is the way she’s going to be.” The two of them asked me -- implored, really -- to move a leg. Despite my best efforts at trying to raise first one, then the other, the messages weren’t reaching those quiet limbs. The feeling in them was fine, but motion was a thing of the past.
A dark haired young man lay on a gurney beyond the foot of my bed. The hospital had long before run out of proper beds. We could see one another during the times when the curtains were pulled back. Looking back and forth at him and more distant, motionless lumps under white sheets occupied most of my waking time for a while. He surprised me, eventually, by saying in a clear voice that people were dying around us.
While I was adjusting to my reduced state of motion, I awoke one morning to see that the little blonde girl lying in the bed a few feet to the right was awfully quiet. One or both of her parents arrived soon afterwards; anguished cries filled the ward, jammed though it was with patients of all ages. The pretty girl had died. Immediately I went to work with Grammie’s stories about life in worlds after this one, visualizing the little girl in the next world, laughing away and smiling like the angel she had suddenly become. When I tried to share this comforting vision with the wailing family, a nurse abruptly jerked shut the curtain between my bed and the other.
My remaining days in the several months I was in Haynes were spent regaining as much use of my body, with diminishing pain, as could be. Doctors repeatedly tested my reflexes with their hard little rubber hammers till I got to clutching my sore knees with my hands whenever one headed in my direction. Being a naturally proactive individual, I took to asking them to let me hit their knees for every time they hit mine. Once in a while one took me up on this kind offer.
Suddenly the staff became anxious to rid themselves of as many of us as possible, and in the shortest amount of time. Seems an epidemic of chicken pox threatened to add to their work load. Fine with me! No concerns about how I would get around the world on my unresponsive legs ever crossed my mind, I just wanted OUT, out of that smelly, dank, dour place, out of doors, out in the woods, out with the horses -- OUT! I sat around shaking with the thrill of the world beyond hospital beds and rubber hammers.
