A 1954 Tonsillectomy
When I was three years old my mother said I was a terrible child who never listened to a word she said. Then the doctors told her it was because I couldn’t hear and needed my tonsils taken out.
A nice nurse wheeled me down the hall, reassuring me as we cornered the turn and entered a tiny little room. I was hungry and thirsty and no one would give me a drink, but behaving none the less. Suddenly a very large man wearing a mask over his face entered the room.
This large, anonymous presence towered over me with a big rubber mask in his hand. The mask was attached to a very large tube that was attached to a loud and noisy machine that I thought was going to be used to suck out my tonsils. I realized it wasn’t going to be pleasant but still tried to behave and hold still.
When he put it over my mouth and nose and I couldn’t breathe, I realized that he was trying to kill me. He was suffocating me!
This man was a murderer and I’d been tricked by his enabling nurse. I tried to sit up and he pushed me back down, struggling with me to hold the stinky, black rubber mask over my face. Using my fists and my feet, I fought this murderous intruder as best as I could, kicking him over and over again, with every ounce of strength that I had, until everything went black. I managed to get the mask off a couple of times in the struggle but he won in the end.
I was surprised when I woke up at home. I was still alive and he hadn’t killed me after all. But my head was swollen and my throat was in fierce pain. My mother tried to give me ice cream. It caused such sharp pain to swallow that I wasn’t the least bit interested. But at last I could hear.
The first sounds I remember hearing were the wails of my big sister, as she jumped up and down beside me, raging because I could have ice cream and she couldn’t. I wished they would just give her the ice cream and shut her up. Her wailing was making it worse. I didn’t even want the damned ice cream.
To this day, my sister brings this episode up almost every time that we get together. “You could have ice cream and I couldn’t!” she yells at me accusingly and pointing her finger. Then she laughs and I smile back at her lamely, but deep inside I’m shaken. I never respond in words. That would never be safe. I wonder to myself in horror, “Is this the core of the resentment that has made this woman beat the hell out of me and my siblings at every family crisis over the past 6 decades?” I shudder inside.
Funny thing, I’ve never been a big fan of ice cream.
Oikos 