Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

For Mom

I don't know what, if anything, my mom understands now. My sister cares for her now and should be sainted. More than several years ago, when my dad was alive, I mentioned to him and to my mom's doctor that I thought that she was suffering from a disorder that was seen in polio survivors of her age characterized by a kind of dementia. My dad was naturally defensive and protective and said he didn't notice anything unusual, which the doctor, of course, took as the truth, rather than do some testing and reading. But that was a while ago and doesn't matter now. I bought my mom a small gift for Mothers' Day that I'll be sending out by Fed Ex with a card. I think she'll like it, even now; and I know she would have liked it back then.

I was 12 years old. I was feverish. The pain was worse than when I spun the blades of the rotary push lawnmower and caught my hand in the blades. My leg, red and swollen, was killing me. It was a sudden thing, no injury, no cuts, no bruises, as I was prone to bring home nearly every day; and my mom and dad took me to see the doctor, the only doctor I could remember in my first 12 years. His office was on an upper floor of a big bank building at the corner of 25th and Clark, in which the elevator was operated by a man in uniform. There was a huge dark, wooden bear in the waiting room, standing on its hind legs with its forelegs outstretched to hold coats or hats or children hanging on.

I'd been in the office before ... more than a few times. The doctor was an older, bald, gray-haired man with thin lips and a bulbous nose, puffing a lit cigar perpetually affixed in the corner of his mouth. He asked me questions, listened to my heart, checked my reflexes, looked down my throat and into my ears and up my nose, felt my arms and legs, and stuck the thermometer in my mouth, all with the cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth. From time to time, ashes fell, pursuant to the Law of Gravity, which was a relatively new thing back in those days.

My mom stood by in the examining room watching over me. My dad stayed back in the waiting room with my sisters, watching them climb on and around their friend, the wooden bear. The doctor, with his gravelly voice, intoned that I needed to be hospitalized immediately. My mother left the room with the doctor, as I sat in the examining room looking at dark brown bottles of tinctures of this, alcohol, and solutions of that. I don't remember much after that, except for waking up in a hospital room with three older men, each in their beds. One of them joked about them all moving to the pediatrics ward and welcoming me back into the real world. My left leg was raised on a pile of pillows with a large hot water bottle wrapped around my leg. The nurse came into the hospital room shortly after I awoke, pulled the curtain, and gave me an injection in my butt because that spot was closest to my leg, or so she claimed. Over the next ten days, I had so many shots of penicillin that the stuff leaked out of the needle holes when injected.

The fever subsided, as did the swelling in my leg. The guy in the bed next to me "left us" one night, the commotion waking me. He was replaced by someone else who didn't speak English. The other two guys in the beds across the room were discharged, both wishing me luck in the coming Little League season, after we had talked baseball for days. And my mom and dad came in every morning, since my dad worked nights and we only had one car and my mom didn't have a driver's license until several years later, making sure I was comfortable, bringing a copy of Don't Knock the Rock, signed by Rocky Colavito, who wrote that I should get better soon. My mom checked my leg, touching, pushing, bending it, making sure it was still working throughout the day, making sure of my recovery.

I didn't know at the time, nor would I find out for many, many years, that my mom fought with the doctor, several doctors, about my medical treatment. It turns out that they wanted to amputate. They didn't know if the penicillin would work. The accepted and preferred treatment, the sure cure, was hacking off the offending leg.

And because of her perspicacity, her tenacity, and her courage to make a difficult decision despite the immense pressure put on her by learned men, because she's my mother, I have two legs still.

Posted by Bill at May 11, 2006 09:39 AM