Tonsillectomy 1966
Below is an excerpt. Click here to read the full piece on page 42 of Rye Magazine, Issue 46, March 2012.
I didn’t turn around to see if anyone was chasing me after I bolted from the examination room, sprinting past the marble statue of the Virgin Mary in the lobby of St. Joseph’s Hospital. I pushed open the heavy doors, and raced as fast as my chubby, ten-year-old legs could carry me, zooming into the street toward the corner. When I finally stopped and quickly glanced behind me, I saw that not only were my mother and my sister, Heidi, chasing after me, but the nurse from the examination room was with them too.
“GET BACK HERE,” my mother yelled.
She caught up to me, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back.
“This is just a simple blood test. Quick. It won’t hurt and you have to have it.”
St. Joseph’s was where Heidi, who was 13, and I were to have our twin tonsillectomies. I did not trust doctors. I did not trust nurses. I did not trust dentists. It was 1966, and I did not want to be touched by anyone but Paul McCartney. Even in my dreams I knew that Paul would be gentle and totally infatuated with me. In my dreams I was sure that doctors were going to strap me to a table, drug me, and wheel me to the morgue.
We’d lived three doors down from St. Joseph’s when I was very little, and my two older sisters had played in the back of the hospital. My sisters would tell me that they took dead hospital patients back there—dead ones. I often dreamt that my family would wake up drugged and strapped in a row of parallel beds, locked up forever behind the stone walls we used to play by. No one was going to do that to me.
They caught me and pulled me back into the hospital. I shuffled past the Virgin Mary in the dead center of the entrance hall, with her contented smile, her clasped hands, and her eyes downcast, like she was watching over me. She certainly wasn’t my “Mother” but she seemed like the only sane, nice lady in the whole joint – my own mother had turned into a co-conspirator.