CHAPTER 23
I started Third Grade at West Whiteland in the fall of 1949. I still remember nada about the school at West Whiteland where I had went. I do recall a morning at home when we lived by the swamp though. Not long after the new Semester began for Second Grade I woke to a bright day. Sun was streaming in through the side window. It was a Saturday and I was not at my grandmothers. Dad had arrived late Friday night, too late to take me to town.
I felt fine until I swung my legs over the side of the bed. A sharp pain hit me. It sliced me in half right across my middle. I screamed at the same time I fell off the bed to the floor. I curled into a ball, yelling in agony.
My mother and father rushed into my room. They must have risen early for both were dressed. My mom was saying over and over, “What’s wrong?”
The pain was too intense; I couldn’t speak. I think I managed to screech, “Pain”. It stabbed me worst when I tried to straighten out.
Dad snatched me up in his arms and took me out and lay me in the back seat of the car. My mother followed and dad drove us at high speed to the hospital in West Chester. I can still see the blur of trees and brush whizzing past the car windows.
He carried me into the emergency ward. Dr. Parke was paged and happened to be in the hospital visiting patients that morning. I was shortly hauled into surgery and told to count backward from 99 as they dripped ether over my face.
I had acute appendicitis and came within a hairbreadth of it bursting. If this had occurred on a day when my father wasn’t home, which were most days, I wouldn’t be writing about it now. I’d been long dead and buried beneath a child’s tombstone reading “Died: Age 8”.
This was 1949 you realize and the odds were against survival. I
escaped death by the slimmest of margins and circumstance. If the attack had come a day earlier, what would my mother have done? It would have been only her and me at the house. She didn’t know how to drive. How would I have gotten to the hospital in time?
In 1949 there was no 911 emergency call service. The first such system was initiated in 1968, almost twenty years too late for me.
She would have had to look up a number in the phone book, but what number? The police? The fire company? There was no ambulance service available to her. Some volunteer ambulance services began in a few locations around 1940, but such ambulance services were manned by untrained community volunteers, there were no trained EMTs yet. The country didn’t have a network of ambulance service manned by medically staffed personal until after the passage of the Emergency Highway Safety Act of 1966.
My mother would most likely have called her father in Downingtown and hope to catch him home. My grandmother didn’t drive either. Mom's father would have to drive out to our place and then up to West Chester. That time to come from Downingtown would probably have seen me with peritonitis and if shock didn’t kill me, it would.
Peritonitis is serious stuff today, but many times more so in the 1940s. The mortality rate was near total. Treating it successfully was nearly impossible. They hadn’t coined the term antibiotic until 1940. There were precious few in existence. Penicillin was developed in 1942, but not available to the general public until after World War II ended in 1945. These medicines were not yet common.
The Good Lord must have decided I had some future use and kept me around.
I was kept for a week in the Children’s Ward at Chester County
Hospital. I didn’t like it much. It was a long rectangle room with beds lining walls on both sides of a center aisle. Everything was open, no privacy, and little quiet. There was a lot of crying in the night making it hard to sleep. There wasn’t much diversion. There weren’t any TVs mounted over beds. Television was not yet in general use anywhere, let alone in hospitals for the entertainment of children.
My discharge could not come until the incision completely closed with no signs of infection. On the final day Doctor Parke came to remove the sutures. This was when I felt that anger against the doctor I spoke of earlier.
I say sutures, but that is not totally correct. The doctor had not stitched me up after surgery; he stapled me back together. Large metal staples held me together. The doctor had to remove them one by one. I don’t know exactly how Doctor Parke did this. Did he have a big pincher thing like you use to remove a staple from papers? All I know is it hurt something fierce when he did it.
Even after I came home I remained out of school for two or three weeks. It was difficult for me to walk without pain during that time, especially going up and down stairs. Eventfully all the pain and stiffness dissipated and I returned to normal life.
I now had a long three-inch worm of a scar running from my
hipbone to near my privates to go along with the jagged one on my palm and the sword scar on my cheek. This too did not disappear until well into middle age, although each year it crept further up my body, as you can see in this 1974 photograph where it runs along the top of my right hip. This was not to be my last scar, neither physically nor internally either.
I wish to make a note here in case the idea of staples should frighten anyone about having surgery. My situation occurred in 1949 when I was a child of 8. Medical procedures have progresses a far distance from what they were in the past. My wife had knee surgery and the wound was closed with 25 staples. A Physical Therapist removed these right in our home and my wife felt no pain whatsoever as each was plucked out.
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