Williams column: Sidelined by typical childhood illnesses

By Mack Williams

For the Salisbury Post

The run-of-the-mill childhood illnesses are a common sharing among a child and his friends. A stomach virus, cold, chickenpox, etc., tends to narrow a child’s world down to the immediateness of his bed, allowing him to spend a little, slower-paced “quality sick- time” with himself, although the things contemplated by a child in his sick bed during that time are of a very different nature and less “weighty” than the contemplations of an old man in his. During Napoleon’s final illness on the island of St. Helena, he remarked of the satisfaction he felt when lying in his bed and surveying that space upon which he was resting, of which he felt that he had complete dominion ( a much narrower space than that which was previously under his dominion).

The illness that frequented me most often in childhood was chronic earache, for which “sweet oil” would be administered into my ear, and I would receive some easing of the pain by lying with the affected ear on a heating pad. I didn’t know then that “sweet oil” was olive oil. Not knowing that, it seemed strange to me back then that the “sweet oil” was being placed somewhere in which there was no sensory organ equipped to gauge its “sweetness.”

After the earache had run its course, I would stuff cotton in my ear to guard its inner recesses from ambient breezes which might, by chance, travel that route and set off the pain again.

The science museum where I work is frequented by many children, and whenever a child passes through with that cotton “earmark,” I know what he has most recently been through, and I feel true empathy with him.

On one occasion, in the early 1960s, my earache was so bad that my parents took me to Dr. Little, the Salisbury ear, nose, and throat specialist. His office was located in that “little village” of doctors’ offices surrounding what then was referred to as Rowan Memorial Hospital.

The layman’s term for that procedure which Dr. Little performed on me was getting one’s ear “opened,” which sounded a lot less frightening than what it truly was : getting the eardrum “lanced” to relieve the swelling due to infection, allowing the built-up fluid to drain.

When Dr. Little performed the procedure, the sharpest and most pointed pain occurred for a split second, followed by peaceful relief, with no trace of pain remaining. That day, it was as if my ear had experienced the pain of death, and after that pain’s cessation, it had traveled down that oft-spoken-of “corridor of light” to a place of peace and aural bliss, and returned, but I have no memory of what it may have heard there.

I was getting over another earache about the time of the Cuban missile crisis. That earache, which was bad enough, was then followed by several days of nervous stomach in contemplation of “the bomb.”

I was also visited by a few of the garden-variety stomach viruses, and at those times, Campbell’s cream-of chicken-soup was always the first item in the realm of solid food that I could handle, prefaced by such liquids as ginger ale or Seven-Up. For me, chicken soup’s benefit to the weakened stomach has always outweighed its benefit to the soul.

I had chicken pox once, and the measles once, each of them producing their own natural vaccine within me to prevent their recurrence (would that earaches, stomach viruses, and the common cold did the same). I remember my mother keeping the blinds closed when I had the measles, since the eyes are very sensitive to the light at that time. I couldn’t go outside into the sunlight and, of course, my peers were prevented from visiting me. Since my mother was born in 1911, she told me of the quarantines generated by the world-wide pandemic “Spanish Flu,” so my mostly bed-ridden situation at the time seemed to be best described by that (without the benefit of the quarantine sign on the front door!).

Of all those childhood ailments, I’m most glad that I “grew out of” those horrible earaches, as most people affected by them do. Perhaps, as I got older, the amount of space in my head increased, allowing my ear canals more area with which to drain and function properly.

Come to think of it, even now, 50 years later as I continue to age, the amount of empty space within my head still sometimes seems to be on the increase!