House Calls

In a recent post I wrote about my mother, I mentioned that she ended up with epilepsy several years after being hit in the back of the head by a baseball. I don't think the connection between the two was made back then by anyone involved.

In that same post, I mentioned the doctor made a house call the first time my mother had a seizure. Doctors made house calls back then after office hours.

My brother sent me an email a couple of days after that post about Mom's birthday, and wondered, "My goodness, how do you remember that kind of detail?"

I replied, "I just figured everybody remembered that kind of detail."

Since then other people have informed me that remembering that kind of detail from your childhood, at least at the age of 4 is a little unusual.

I don't know whether it's usual or not, but with me those memories are just there.

Making reference to the doctor making a house call, reminded me of how Dr. Preston Hall in St. Louis was our family doctor. His name is on my birth certificate from 1956. He was the doctor my mother saw regularly when I was little.

When I was 4, mom saw Dr. Hall every other week. She got a B12 injection and something else I don't recall. She said she just felt completely run down without that B12 shot. So every other week we'd walk from our house to the doctor's office on 39th Street. Sometimes we took a cab, but most of the time back then we walked. His office was on the second floor of that building and there was no elevator.

Dr. Hall's office seemed like a magical place. His original office was in an older building that had steam heat. In the winter, the radiators had silver fittings that emitted steam when the system was on at full blast. There was a black and white TV in the outer waiting room - and often we'd be there several hours before the doctor could see mom and the only thing on TV was usually soap operas. The waiting room was usually packed. In the summer the office was fun because it had air conditioning - nothing fancy, just a big window air conditioner that kept the room supplied with cool air. And let's not forget that since this was 1960 - people still smoked in doctors' waiting rooms.

There was an outer waiting room and and inner waiting room. Once you got to the inner waiting room it was usually a matter of minutes before you saw the doctor.

Someone in the doctor's office apparently was a bit on the eccentric side but I don't know if it was the doctor or someone on his staff.

There were critters in that inner office.

Between two of the waiting chairs, a stuffed puffer fish hung from the ceiling by a string. I could reach out and touch the puffer fish if I wanted to. They told me it was dangerous to humans alive but not in the stuffed state.

This is a picture that looks like the stuffed puffer fish, but is not the actual one from the doctor's office.

There were also live critters in that inner office. At one time there was live blue-jay in a cage in one corner. It would squawk every once in a while and jump from a perch on the inside of the cage down to the cage floor, and then back up and do that repeatedly.

Another time they had a live squirrel in a cage. The doctor's helper would feed the squirrel peanuts to entertain any children in that office.

Thinking about that inner office now is kind of creepy. Aside from the issues with having wild animals in a cage - was that even legal? - there's the cleanliness issue. Blue-jays and squirrels aren't exactly prim and proper with respect to their bathroom habits. And this was in a doctor's office!

Mom had trouble with the toenails on her big toes getting extremely thick. Dr. Hall offered the solution of "removing them" from time to time. Looking back, this seems pretty barbaric. He'd use what looked like a pair of pliers, grab the toenail at the end and yank it off. Mom winced in pain when he did that, but she preferred that instead of having to deal with that very thick toenail. Hasn't removing nails been used as torture somewhere? It was a bit disturbing to watch that as a 4 year old.

There you have some more memories from my childhood. Filed under, "Strange but True."

So it goes.