When I woke up, I didn't understand where I was. I seemed to be in someone's basement. I found myself lying down, which was good because I was a little sleepy. This basement room was cool and there weren't any windows. The walls were odd. Instead of the usual unfinished gray porous cement, each of the blocks in the wall had been surfaced with green ceramic tile. This was a very fancy basement.
The blank green tile wall was at my left, so I turned my head to the right, trying to orient myself by the sounds coming mostly from that way. Machines were humming. Adults I didn't know were chatting and laughing about something or other. I heard and felt a kind of crackly sound-sensation as I moved. I seemed to be resting on a couple of layers of waxed paper or something.
I was lying on my back on a semi-soft surface, like a naugahyde sofa maybe. I was face up, but I couldn't see very much because there was so much glare. The lights weren't hurting my eyes, exactly, but they were very bright and they washed everything out around them so the world looked faded. Also the light fixtures seemed really unusual. I thought the ceiling lamps looked weird and ultra-modern, like something in that new space-age cartoon "The Jetsons." Chrome housings, with brilliant white bulbs and no frosted covers to soften or diffuse the intensely white light coming from the bulbs. The lamps were really large and there were a lot of them, way more than anybody would have in a basement rec room.
Funny lights, I thought hazily. Those lights reminded of something, something on television. Because my poor mother had three small children underfoot, TV was my babysitter and by the age of five, I had already watched a lot of shows I didn't understand. Along with "Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman" and some gloomy film noir flicks, I'd seen some medical dramas and old movies on Channel 8. Hospitals and emergency operation excitement were in a lot of shows. Hey, those big bright lights were for a surgical suite. A-HA! I was in the operating room and my consciousness had overcome the ether. I'd woken up in the middle of my tonsillectomy. How exciting!
I wasn't scared because I knew doctors from television and they were kind and helpful and they knew what they were doing. The one helping me with my tonsils wore the same green surgical cap and the rectangular face mask (untied and lying open like a white bib) that Dr. Kildare wore on his television show. I knew he always did everything right, because on TV the Kildare patients always got well. Therefore all would be well with me by the end of this episode when the commercial would come on.
But then I felt the string on the right side of my throat, and that string was on the inside. I was sure it must be a piece of kite string. I had no idea that tonsils were cut out with a scalpel. No one had explained to me how the doctor got rid of the bad old germy things. I had assumed they were taken out by tying a string around each and then pulling, the way baby teeth were being extracted at home. The string on the right must be looped around my right tonsil, and feeling the length of kite string touch my throat on the inside set off my gag reflex. I began to cough and choke.
The surgeon, who I could see now was older and heavier than Richard Chamberlain (was he Dr. Kildare's father?) saw me struggling and he picked up a glass beaker with some liquid in it. Something blobby was in the beaker with the opaque fluid. The surgeon held up the beaker, and began to swirl it, so that whatever was in there spun around a bit. "Don't you want to see your tonsils?" he said, grinning.
Of course I did. I was a little kid. I liked gross stuff, and the weirder the better. While I was distracted, the anesthesiologist had sneaked up to the head of the operating table and now the rubber mask was once again over my nose and mouth.
I knew all about the black rubber mask. It was attached to the hose which was in turn attached to the ether gas canister on the rolling metal cart. I'd been pretty excited at the start of the operation when it was time for me to breathe in the anesthetic. I wasn't scared at all. The mask was cool because it reminded me of the oxygen mask that fighter pilots wore in World War II movies which I saw on "Afternoon Matinee" on our black and white television at home. "Blackjack Four! Bogey at four o'clock!"
I'd wanted my tonsils out for weeks. Terrible earaches had made my existence hellish for a long time, and then a previous surgery date had been scrubbed when I'd had a flare-up and was too sick for the operation. What a disappointment that had been! So now it was finally the day and I wanted to be put under so the evil earache-causing tonsils could be taken out. I'd been promised ice cream (in fact, asked for which flavor I preferred) but mostly I was thrilled to have the pain go away for good.
But there was one little thing I needed to take care of before the sweet ether gas took me off to dreamland.
"Hey," I told the anesthesiologist just before I'd first been put to sleep for the operation. "You should put more in there for me." I pointed to the canister on the cart. "I have more --" I was groping for the word "personality," maybe, or "energy," but I didn't have the words at five years old. "It will take more medicine for me to stay asleep."
He smiled indulgently, ignored my warning, and clamped the rubber cup over my nose and mouth. The odor was sweet and slightly toxic, a little like Crest toothpaste mixed with gasoline. I quickly forgot my previous concern. I was told to count backwards and I was proud to have gotten all the way to 96 before. . .
And I'd been right! The doctors had given me the standard dosage of anesthetic without understanding that some people were more spirited than others. My strong curious mind had risen through the fog of the sleeping gas like \giant octopus rising from the bottom of the ocean in "It Came From Beneath The Sea."
After I woke up the second time, I was sick to my stomach and my throat hurt, and I realized that the promise of ice cream had been a terrible lie. They knew, I realized. They knew the whole time it wouldn't matter if I said vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. I wasn't going to have any darn ice cream. They just said that.
But my bitterness was short-lived, because my parents, along with the surgeon, who was possibly Dr. Kildare's father, had come by to see me in my hospital room, after the surgery. And I could joyfully tell them all, croakily, that I had been right. It was going to be so gratifying. No one ever listened to a little kid, especially a little girl. But I had known I would wake up. I had told the doctor with the black face mask to give me extra ether, and he hadn't listened and I had been proved right. I didn't feel a whit of resentment or alarm; I was quite pleased that I'd been the guinea pig in my own last-minute impromptu medical theory and now I had proof! I was a geeeeeenius!
"I woke up!!" I said, gloating over the memory of the green tiled walls and the surgical lights and the floating tonsils in the jar. (I'd forgotten the "string," which of course must have been the suction tube.) "I woke up and I saw the operation!"
Each of my parents turned to look at the surgeon, each with the same worried, confused facial expression.
He smiled reassuringly at my mother and father. "Very common with the anesthetic," he said. "Children, you know. The medicine and then their imaginations. . ."
I was outraged. "It wasn't a dream, I --" My voice became a raspy squeak and there was a stab of pain. A nurse hurried in to give me a drink of red Kool-Aid with several mini-cubes of ice floating in it. The cold metal straw had a permanent bend it it, I remember.
All four adults told me to rest, and my teddy bear was tucked under the blanket with me, and the hospital blanket was pulled up to my chin, and my parents said they would come and get me in the morning. They did, and I believe later in the day I was given first choice of a scoop from a paper carton of Neapolitan ice cream, which I was totally capable of consuming happily.
There is another part of the memory of the tonsillectomy which does seem like a dream, and yet I don't think it was. I was in a "semi-private" room in the children's wing of St. Francis Hospital, which meant that a heavy curtain on rings separated the room into mirror images of each other: two hospital beds with matching night stands and a visitor's chair each. I remember that I was in the bed on the right side of the room as visitors came in the door from the hallway, and I also remember that the girl I shared my room with was African-American.
Indianapolis, in 1962, was totally racially segregated. There was no mixing of whites with people of color. There were Black grocery stores and gas stations and shoe stores and then there were groceries and filling stations and shoe stores for white people. This went double for personal spaces like restaurants or bathrooms or medical offices. Indianapolis didn't even need to post "Whites Only" signs as the code was understood. If one went somewhere, and you saw people of the other race there, that meant you were in the wrong place. You should go find "your own" people there and do business, get needed services, or shop with people whose skin tone matched yours.
But I remember the girl in the other half of the hospital room, and she was very sad about being hurt or sick, especially after visiting hours when it was just the two of us in the room. It had been better for her in the afternoon. A lot of other Black people had come over to Beech Grove's hospital to see her, and I remember thinking "Oh, that's her family." I know it sounds odd, but I had almost no contact with Black people up till then, and I don't think I'd realized until that moment that if a kid was African-American, then their mother, father, aunts, and uncles likely would be too. I do realize how this sounds, but I was pretty clueless and at the age where I thought, when my parents said "When I was little. . " they meant they had been miniature versions of themselves. I didn't realize yet that my parents had once been children who had grown up into adults. So I wasn't too clear on how race worked, but I was catching on that it was connected with who your relatives were.
I did understand unfairness, and I did understand that people of my race were often mean to Black people or lost patience with them or didn't try to understand who they were or how they lived. I wasn't even in school yet but I already saw how racism worked. So I wasn't surprised that the white nurse used me to shame my roommate, but I felt awful about it.
As I said, the other girl in my room was sad about being sick or needing an operation or whyever she was in St. Francis, and I don't think she'd ever been away from home either. So she was crying in her bed, but not dramatically or loudly. There was no wailing or pleading for help or sympathy. She just kind of snuffled and made little sad crying noises like a kitten that wanted the mommy cat.
The nurse came in and said sternly, "See how good this little girl (meaning me) is being?" She beamed at me, then frowned at the other girl. "She doesn't cry and carry on."
That's not fair! I thought. I have a teddy bear hidden under my blanket! That girl doesn't have a teddy so she's lonely.
I wish I could report that I had gotten up, and gone over to comfort her with eyes full of compassion like Elizabeth Taylor in "Jane Eyre," perhaps given her the use of my teddy bear till she fell asleep. But no, I was five. (And what does it say that I was five years old and hiding my teddy so the nurse wouldn't think I was a baby? Sheesh.)
I also wish that I could say that this early experience helped me to deepen my cultural competence later in life so I didn't have to look at my own racial attitudes. But alas, no again. When you are raised in segregation, you are deprived of real world practice in living with people who look, think, and make life choices different from your own appearance, decisions, tastes, and experiences. I still had to try and figure it all out later.
It was 1962. The Civil Rights Act hadn't been signed. We'd never heard of National Brotherhood Week. And you know, I was still at the age where I thought that doctors pulled your tonsils out with a string.
The musical portion of our program!
