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Are You Sure You're Sick?
by
Harry Buschman
My mother
looked at me suspiciously and said:
"Are you sure you're sick?"
She had a good reason to be suspicious. During the
endless gray winter that
began at Halloween and lasted 'til Easter Sunday
none of the family was at
their best. We lived on the fourth floor of a five
story cold water tenement,
and during the closed in days of winter we shared
the same air. The windows
were shut tight and sealed with newspaper on All-Hallow's
Eve, the kerosene
stoves were lit, the gas oven was turned on, and we
hibernated until the
first sign of spring.
We were a family of five. My father was never
without the stub of a soggy
White Owl cigar clamped belligerently between his
teeth .... my uncle was
never without a cigarette in his mouth and another
behind his ear. My mother
couldn't cook anything without burning it, and my
aunt stank of the gaggy
perfume she pilfered while working for Woolworth's.
In such an atmosphere you
would expect all of us to be sick all of the time
-- and to some degree we
were. But sick enough for a doctor? That was the
$64 question when the rash
erupted or the dizzy spells made it difficult to
climb the four flights of
stairs.
Doctors made house calls then. They charged $2.50 a
visit, and you made damn sure you were sick before you spent that kind of
money for a sore throat or a
runny nose. Money like that didn't grow on trees --
it would feed the family
for a week. Whenever I felt sick enough to whimper
about it, my mother would
say, "Are you sure you're sick?" She would not
accept my opinion, she would
send me off to school with faith in my resilience
and trust in my
recuperative powers. "Oh, he'll take a turn for the
better" -- or, if not,
the school nurse was probably a better judge of
such things than she was.
Usually getting out of the apartment and into the
fresh air cured me, but
occasionally I picked up something that was "going
around" and the nurse
would send me home.
Seeing me at the door again, my mother would heave
a sigh of resignation and
rummage through the medicine cabinet. She was not a
good pharmacist and the
things she found there and forced down my throat
probably did more harm than
good. After a day or two of home remedies, and
seeing no improvement, (and
more than likely a steady decline) she would be
forced to admit that I must
be sick and that maybe she should call the doctor
and ask him to come over.
We had no telephone of course. The doctor had one,
so did police stations,
hospitals and a few very important people. We did
not. The only phone we
could use was in "Goofy" Margolis's candy store on
the corner. It was in
constant use by the horse players in the
neighborhood and there was always a
waiting line. My mother had more important things
to do around the house, so
she would wait for my father to get home and tell
him to go and phone the doctor. He'd go off, grumbling how he had no use for
doctors, and anyway "we
coddle our kids too much these days -- run off for
the doctor the minute they
get the sniffles .... are you sure you're sick,
kid?" From my sick bed I
would look up through the clouds of smoke from his
White Owl and assure him I
was and that even the school nurse said I was.
Well, as I said, doctors made house calls in those
days. They had office
hours in the morning and went on tour in the
afternoon. Sick people didn't go
to the doctor, he came to them on foot wearing a
black suit and carrying a
black leather bag of tools, like a plumber. During
the morning he lanced
boils and set broken bones in his office but his
afternoons were spent with
the bed-ridden. My father would come back from the
candy store and say the
doctor would drop by tomorrow afternoon, then he'd
light up a new cigar, give
me a wink and say, "We'll have you back up on your
feet in no time, soldier."
My uncle, with a Camel in his mouth would look in
and ask, "What's the matter
with the kid -- sick again?"
By this time I would have progressed from sick to
ill, and whatever was wrong
with me had a viselike grip on my delicate
constitution -- I would have grave
doubts of living long enough for the doctor to see
me alive. But children are
a hardy lot and usually recover in spite of the
care and affection they
receive at home. Nevertheless, I couldn't help
feeling they were trying to do
me in. I would lie there looking at the pattern of
lights on the ceiling cast
by the kerosene stove and try to understand the
unfathomable secret of life,
I would count on the fingers of one hand my
pitifully few achievements and
drift off in feverish sleep wondering who would get
my stamp album after I
was gone.
But, as it always did, dawn would break, and sick
as I was, I'd be hungry. My
mother would put something like kippers and home
fried potatoes on my lap and
I would eat it in bed. I would get a "sponge-down"
and clean underwear in
preparation for the doctor's appearance and spend
the morning wondering how
school was getting along without me.
The appearance of a doctor in your bedroom was, and
always will be
awe-inspiring. It is similar to witnessing the
performance of a great actor
on the stage. You watch his every move, listen
carefully to everything he
says, and try as best you can to catch the hidden
implications he may have
inferred but left unsaid. "Well, he's really sick
.... there's a touch of
pneumonia, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's got
the chicken pox, a lot of
it going around -- God!" he would add. "the air is
foul in here, smells like
a poker game. Keep his bowels open and make him
drink a quart of water every
day." It didn't take long for a doctor to get down
to business in those days,
he didn't have to make tests and nobody dared talk
back to him. He'd take a
quick look at you and more than likely, if you knew
what was good for you,
you started to feel better right away.
Then he'd take my mother into the kitchen and lay
out the routine for my
recovery. "Go down to the drug store and get a
block of sulfur -- boil it in
a pot on the back of the stove, that'll keep the
rest of you from getting
whatever he's got. Get yourself a roll of
cheesecloth and hang it in his
bedroom door -- keep it wet, that'll keep his germs
from getting out of the
bedroom." He would leave as quickly as he came with
a parting, "Hang in there
little fella, you'll be up on your feet in no
time," to me, and to my mother
a reassuring smile and a parting, "You know, you'd
all be a lot better off if
you opened a window in here now and then."
It wasn't only a question of diagnosing what you
had, it was also looking for
signs of what you didn't have. One thing you could
be sure of, so long as you
were not at death's door, there was no danger of
being sent off to a
hospital. No doctor wanted that. He would have to
say goodbye to that $2.50
per visit once the hospital got its claws in you.
So if your number wasn't
up, little by little nature would take over and
you'd get better. My friend
Ernie would bring my homework from school every
day, and I suspect I learned
every bit as much doing my lessons in bed as I did
under the watchful eye of
Mrs. Martel at P.S. 9. Finally, when I did get back
to school I would carry a
magic note from the doctor excusing me from all
strenuous physical activity,
and if I was really lucky I might even get
permission to leave school earlier
than everyone else did.
During the convalescence at home a kid was as close
to Heaven as he could get
without actually going there. The bed was covered
with the toys I loved best,
there were things like orange juice just for the
asking and when my father
came home from work he would read to me. He would
put his soggy cigar on the
kitchen stove, clear a place on the bed and lie
down next to me and off we'd
go to Treasure Island or the court of King Arthur.
I would drift off to sleep
wishing I could be sick forever.
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