Are You Sure You're Sick?

Are You Sure You're Sick?

by Harry Buschman

My mother looked at me with considerable doubt and asked, "Are you sure you're sick?"

She had good reason to be doubtful, for during the endless gray winter that began at Halloween and lasted until Easter Sunday, none of the family were in the best of health. We lived on the fourth floor of a five story cold water tenement, and during the closed in days of winter we shared the same air. The windows were shut tight and sealed with newspaper. The kerosene stoves were lit, the gas oven was turned on, and we hibernated until the first sign of spring.

We were a family of five. My father was never without the soggy stub of a White Owl cigar clamped belligerently between his teeth ... my uncle, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and another behind his ear. My mother couldn't cook anything without burning it, and my aunt stank of the perfume she slipped into her purse while working for Woolworth's. In such an atmosphere you would expect people to be sick all the time – and to some degree we were. But sick enough ro pay for a doctor’s house call? That was the 64 dollar question when the rash erupted or the dizzy spells made it difficult to climb the four flights of stairs.

Doctors made house calls back then. They charged $2.50 a visit, and you made damn sure you were sick before you spent that kind of money for a sore throat or a runny nose. Money like that didn't grow on trees – it would feed the family for a two or three days. Whenever I felt sick enough to whine about it, my mother would say, "Are you sure you're sick?" She would not accept my opinion, instead she would send me off to school with faith and trust in my recuperative powers. "Oh, he'll take a turn for the better," or if not, the school nurse was probably a better judge of such things than she was. Usually getting out of the apartment and into the open air cured me, but occasionally I came down with something that was "going around" and the nurse sent me home.

If my mother saw me at the door again, she would sigh in resignation and rummage through the medicine cabinet. She was not a pharmacist and the things she found there and forced down my throat probably did more harm than good. After a day or two of home remedies, and seeing no improvement, (more likely a steady decline) she would be forced to admit that I must be sick and that maybe she should call the doctor and ask him to come over.

We didn't have a telephone and no one we knew had one. The doctor had one, so did police stations, hospitals and a few very important people. We did not. The only phone we could use was on the wall of "Goofy" Margolis's candy store on the corner. It was in constant use by race track gamblers in the neighborhood and there was always a waiting line. My mother had more important things to do around the house, so she would wait for my father to get home and tell him to go and phone the doctor. He'd go off, grumbling how he had no use for doctors, and anyway "we baby our kids too much these days – run off for the doctor the minute they get the sniffles .... are you sure you're sick, kid?" From my sick bed I would look up through the cloud of smoke from his White Owl and assure him I was sick and even the school nurse said I was sick.

Yes, those days doctors made house calls. They had office hours in the morning and went on tour in the afternoon. Sick people didn't go to the doctor, he came to them on foot wearing a black suit and carrying a black leather bag of tools – like a plumber. During the morning he lanced boils and set broken bones in his office but his afternoons were spent on the road to visit the bed-ridden.

My father came back from the candy store and said the doctor would drop by tomorrow afternoon, then he lit up a fresh cigar, gave me a wink and said, "We'll have you up on your feet in no time, soldier." My uncle, with a Camel in his mouth came in and asked, "What's the matter with the kid – sick again?"

Now that I knew the doctor was coming to see me, I quickly progressed from sick to sicker, and whatever was wrong with me got a viselike grip on my crumbling constitution. I began to have doubts about living long enough for the doctor to see me in time. But children are a hardy lot and usually recover in spite of the loving care and affection they get at home. Nevertheless, I sometimes entertained the thought that my family had enough of me and were trying to do me in. I lay there looking at the pattern of lights on the ceiling cast by the kerosene stove next to my bed and tried to fathom the mystery of life, I counted on the fingers of one hand my pitifully few accomplishments, then I drifted off in feverish sleep wondering who would get my stamp album after I was gone.

But, as it always did, dawn broke, and sick as I was, I was hungry. My mother put something like kippers and home fried potatoes in my lap and I ate it in bed. I got a "sponge-down" and clean underwear in deference to the doctor's appearance and spent the morning wondering how school was getting along without me.

The appearance of a doctor in a child’s bedroom was, and always will be an awesome experience. It is similar to witnessing the performance of a great actor on the stage. You watch his every move, listen carefully to everything he says, and try as best you can to catch the hidden implications he may infer, but leave unsaid. "Well, he's really sick, there's a touch of pneumonia, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's got the chicken pox, a lot of it going around – God!" he added ... "the air is foul in here, smells like a poker game. Keep his bowels open and make him drink a quart of water every day." It didn't take long for a doctor to get down to business in those days, he didn't make tests and nobody dared ask question him. He'd take a quick look at you and more than likely, if you knew what was good for you, you started to get better right away.

Then he took my mother into the kitchen and laid out the routine for my recovery. "Go down to the drug store and get a block of sulfur – boil it in a pot on the back of the stove, that will keep the rest of you from getting whatever he's got. Get yourself a roll of cheesecloth and hang it in his bedroom door. Keep it wet, that'll keep his germs from getting out of the bedroom." He left as quickly as he came with a parting, "Hang in there little fella, you'll be on your feet in no time," to me, and to my mother a reassuring smile and a parting, "You know, you'd all be a lot healthier if you opened a window in here."

It wasn't only a question of diagnosing what you had, it was looking for signs of what you didn't have, the things that might send you to the hospital. One thing you could be sure of, so long as you were not at death's door, there was no danger of being sent to the hospital. No doctor wanted that. He would have to say goodbye to $2.50 per visit once the hospital got its hooks in you. So if your number wasn't up, little by little nature would take over and you'd get better. My friend Ernie would bring my homework from school every day, and I suspect I learned as much doing my lessons in bed as I did under the watchful eye of Mrs. Martel at P.S. 9. Finally, when I did get back to school I carried a magic note from the doctor excusing me from all strenuous physical activity, and if I was really lucky I might even get permission to leave school earlier than everyone else did.

During the convalescence at home a kid was as close to Heaven as he could get without actually being there. The bed was covered with the toys I loved best. There were things like orange juice just for the asking and when my father came home from work he would read to me. He would put his soggy cigar in the ash tray on the kitchen stove, clear a place on the bed and lie down next to me and off we'd go to Treasure Island or the court of King Arthur, and I would drift off to sleep wishing I could be sick forever.