POX, DOTS, ACHES AND PAINS

Back in the olden days, there was no such thing as childhood vaccinations.  Or if there were, I never got any.  In fact, I rarely went to the doctor due to illness. It wasn't that I didn't get sick.  But my mother just relied on good, old fashioned home remedies to get me through it.

When I had measles as a preschooler, my mother kept the blinds and curtains drawn in the house because the light hurt my eyes.  I remember her sitting and holding me on her lap quite a bit because I was so miserable.  The aspirin that she gave me for fever would have been mashed up in a spoon with either honey or sugar.  Even before Mary Poppins, mother knew that a spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down.

I frequently got ear aches.  That's when the oily ear ache drops would come out.  Mother would put some in the offending ear and then put cotton in my ear to keep the stuff from running out.  I probably got the aspirin with sugar for fever as well. Leg aches were a common occurrence for me when I was little. Sometimes, I was given the aspirin with honey.  But more often, my father massaged my legs until they felt better.

One childhood illness that I never got was chicken pox.  I got exposed to them plenty of times but never actually got them.  My mother would even take me to play with friends who had chicken pox hoping that the exposure would make me get them as well.  I must have had some kind of natural immunity because I never got them even when my own five children had them.


I sprained my ankle more than once.  I wasn't rushed off to the ER to get fixed up.  Mother would wrap my ankle and have me stay off it the best I could.  When I sprained my ankle in junior high, I kept going to school and limped around the halls without crutches.  I didn't think it was cruel and unusual treatment.  It was just the way it was.

I do remember going to the doctor once when I had a really bad sore throat.  It turned out to be tonsillitis.  I was probably given some kind of antibiotic.  But more than likely, I got treated by mother with her home remedies.  I still have my tonsils.

I'm glad that when my kids were little that vaccinations and antibiotics were readily available.  We still had to deal with chicken pox.  The parents of my grandchildren don't even have to worry about chicken pox since there's now a vaccine for that.

Some how, without the benefit of vaccines and current medications, I survived the illnesses of my youth.

Update: My sister, Linda, confirms that we rarely went to a doctor as children.  She says she had every childhood illness, including many bouts with tonsillitis, both kinds of measles and whooping cough. As a teenager, she missed about two weeks of school with some kind of illness.  She says she came home from school one day and woke up later thinking it was the next day when it was actually two weeks later.  She had lost a lot of weight as well.  However, we all got small pox vaccinations.  I think that was because they were being given at school.