Sore Throats and Ice Cream

This morning I was hopping through broadcast channels and there was an episode of Family Affair about little Buffy having her tonsils out (and of course Uncle Bill and Mr. French were more strung out about it than either Buffy or her brother Jody). Buffy has no problem with going to the hospital and rides there in a taxi in one of her fetching designer outfits (later you could buy them in department stores), her doll Mrs. Beasley, and a cute little suitcase. Post surgery she writes cute messages on a little chalkboard because her throat was too sore for talking.

I'm not sure if the designer outfit and the taxi ride would have put any glamour on my tonsil experience.

Liberating kids from their tonsils seemed to be a cottage industry in the 1960s. I think doctors today hold off unless the situation is dire, but back then it seemed every kid on earth underwent a tonsillectomy, as well as having their adenoids extracted. I had frequent colds, and until my pediatrician realized I probably had an allergy, extracting the tonsils/adenoids combo seemed the way to cure the problem.

So, if it had to be done, it had to be done before I started school.

The gotcha back then for kids was the ice cream. You're five years old, and being sick wasn't fun—but in a way it was. You got to snuggle in blankets and watch TV on the sofa and eat chicken soup, and since Mom didn't work, you had her for company all day, and Liquiprim and alcohol rubdowns were the price you paid for all this luxury. Why would you want to go to a hospital—and unless you were one of those poor sick kids you saw in the St. Jude commercials or during the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon on Labor Day, you never saw the inside of one, because kids weren't allowed inside back then, not even if your mother or dad was there, but instead you had to stay with relatives—to "feel better" when you could eat chicken soup with rice and watch The Secret Storm with Mom?

So to get you to feel better about going to a hospital and staying overnight and having your tonsils out, they promised you all the ice cream you could eat. Ice cream for breakfast, and lunch, and supper if you wanted, because that was the best thing to soothe your throat after the surgery. C'mon, what kid's going to turn that down?

There's a sweet little commercial on here for Children's Hospital of Atlanta that shows a winsome little blonde girl calmly going into some type of hospital or outpatient clinic for surgery. The nurse is smiling and young and curtseys to the child like she is a princess, and the little girl is wheeled solemnly but trustingly down a hall as the parents look on. This must be a modern thing. I definitely was no little princess, just a short little girl with bobbed brown hair who still remembers being placed, not on a gurney by a smiling young medical assistant, but in a hospital room or some sort of supply room (I recall cupboards) that had been done over as a playroom with the addition of some toys and blocks. There were several other children there, and one by one, one of them would leave with a nurse and never come back. Apparently they thought kids our age (about five) wouldn't notice this troubling reduction, but trust me, we did. Little Mary left, and then little Tom, and they never came back. Could you imagine anything more fairy-tale nightmarish? Finally there were only two children left, a little boy and myself, and we knew what would happen the next time the nurse arrived. We quickly consulted. Now, off to one side of the room was a gurney with a sheet covering it, all the way to the floor. We crawled under it, convinced that we'd never be seen behind that sheet.

The expected nurse came, of course, and this time it was my turn, but I had to be fished out from under the gurney. I don't know if I was crying, but I sure wanted to if I wasn't. She pretty much had to drag me out.

After that it got hazy, but the one thing that starkly stands out is being laid down and secured on the operating table, with masked faces bobbing above me, and the big, dark, looming ether mask coming down on my face while a disembodied voice told me not to be afraid. It blotted out the light, and I remember struggling and crying and then blackness. I think most of my problems with anesthesia today come from having that horror-film image hovering in the back of my mind.

But it was finally over. I was lying in a big white hospital bed with the sorest throat ever. Everything in hospitals was white back then. Today the nurses and aides and techs wear colorful scrubs, even florals, or they are color-coded to the department the person is in. Nurses back then wore starched white dresses, white caps (possibly with a pop of color of a logo), white or light stockings with the seams very firmly straight upon their calves, and white shoes with soft crepe soles. (Doctors wore white in the operating room, but when they came to visit you in your room they were usually in a suit and tie.) The nurse did everything: she responded to the call button and tidied your bed and brought your pills, speaking in the standard soft voice. Back then hospitals were quiet unless you were in the emergency room. Visiting hours were only from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9, and only adults, as I mentioned, could visit. If you missed your mom you just had to cry until visiting hours arrived. And not much company because you had to pay for a television or radio or a telephone in your room.

My mother and father arrived that afternoon to find me crying. After the frightening waiting room and the sinister nurse and the terrifying ether cone, I wanted my ice cream, the promised ice cream, to sooth my painful throat. And all they were serving me was vanilla. Icky-tasting, nasty, gross vanilla! Not even Newport Creamery-quality vanilla, but the cheap bricks they served to you for dessert at weddings when they didn't have any Neapolitan. I ate nothing but chocolate (and an occasional coffee) and despised vanilla with all my heart. In vain they tried to explain this was all the hospital had. I refused to eat it and instead struggled to drink cold water.

What brought this all back? When Jody came down with tonsillitis at the end of the episode, they gave him chocolate. New York hospitals must have been swanker then, or Uncle Bill bankrolled it. Lucky Jody. Even all these years later, the five-year-old in me twinged in envy.

(And yeah, I still hate vanilla. 😐 )