6 Hospital
One day, sometime soon after starting Kindergarten, I had such a terrible stomach ache that my mother picked me up and brought me home early. My parents assumed that it was something I ate, or that I’d eaten too much, but when the pain continued the next morning, they thought maybe I’d caught a virus of some sort and kept me home from school. I was feverish and couldn’t hold down food, so after a few more days they began to become concerned.
My family didn’t have a lot of income, but in those days it wasn’t unusual to be like us without health insurance of any kind. Doctor visits were cheap, especially for routine things like childhood vaccinations, so most people just paid for their medical bills in cash. But even the few dollars it would cost to visit the Neillsville Clinic was a tradeoff for my parents – it was money that couldn’t be spent on other things – so I was kept home in my mother’s care until finally they decided that my condition wasn’t a normal illness. They needed professional help.
I don’t remember much about my first visit to the hospital. My mother knew Dr. Thompson, the doctor who had delivered me five years previously, but this time I was assigned to Dr. Ozturk, one of two Turkish-born doctors of the four or five doctors at the Neillsville Community Hospital. He spoke with a friendly accent, his face smiling and eyes squinting when he examined me.
He was a surgeon. The small staff at the hospital had determined that I had a bowel obstruction – my intestines were wrapped around themselves in a tight knot that prevented passage – and having waited so long for treatment, I was in a dangerous situation.
Bowel obstructions are very rare in small children. Years later I learned that, as a baby, I was born with a hernia, a not uncommon condition caused when the navel doesn’t completely close over after the umbilical cord is cut.1 In nearly all cases, the belly button closes over naturally in a few weeks or months, but in my case it took longer – years – and apparently a piece of my bowels had become entangled as a result, leaving me obstructed.
The standard treatment is to wait it out, inserting a tube through the nose into the stomach to release pressure on the intestines. An intravenous (IV) drip was placed into my tiny five-year-old arm to give me some badly-needed hydration and food. But having waited so long for treatment, my condition was already serious and unlikely to fix itself on its own, so Dr. Ozturk decided to operate.
Surgery on a five-year-old is a big deal to any parent or relative, but having been doubled over in pain now for a week, I don’t remember much. In later hospitalizations I would revel in the attention, but perhaps my condition was so serious that I was simply too weak to notice anything.
They operated, and along the way Dr. Ozturk decided to remove my appendix. I’m unsure why. Appendicitis is very unusual – perhaps unheard of – at that age, and it would have been a straightforward procedure to adjust the bowels to end the obstruction. Maybe my condition was worse than expected, and inflammation had spread to the appendix? More likely, I now think, he removed the appendix because to a 1960s doctor, it was a vestigial organ whose only effect on health would be negative, if later inflamed, and he thought that as long as he was in there anyway, he might as well get rid of it and save any potential later trouble.
Anyway, the surgery was a complete success and I made a full recovery. I was back in kindergarten, back playing with my friends, back with my family, just a normal five-year-old boy. The only change was that now I had a story, something that made me special. I was the kid in the family who’d been in the hospital.
Interestingly, one of my children was born with and quickly got over a similar condition, so it may be hereditary. ↩︎