My throat was very sore; so sore that it hurt to swallow my spit. I didn’t even want to think about swallowing the soup Mom had given me to eat. Leading me over to a window where there was better light, she ordered, “Open your mouth. I want to see what your throat looks like.” I whined and cried. “Now stop that,” Mom demanded, “I’m just going to look. My looking won’t make your throat hurt worse.”

Opening my mouth, I allowed Mom to turn my head this way and that, so the light from the window could help her to examine every inch of my throat. Daddy, still sitting at the kitchen table asked, “How does her throat look?”

Mom sat down at the table to tell Daddy, “We need to take Kathy to see Doctor Kroeplin again. I think she has strep throat like last spring. Her throat has white spots, and her tonsils are so swollen they are almost touching each other.” Hearing this, I began to howl and sob. Last year when I was in third grade, Dr. Kroeplin prescribed penicillin pills for me. He said I had to take them because the strep infection in my throat could damage my heart.

I suffered from the family curse: the inability to swallow pills. Even when my throat was normal, I couldn’t get pills past my back molars without gagging. I knew Daddy had the same problem. On the rare occasion that he needed to take a pill, he struggled to swallow it. Mom would scold, “It’s just a little pill. I’ve seen you swallow huge bites of raw potato dumplings with no problem!”

To make things worse, the penicillin pills tasted and smelled worse than anything I’d ever known of. Mom tried to hide them in apple sauce. She bribed me with the rare luxury of a glass of orange juice. We even tried to push them down with homemade bread thickly slathered with creamy peanut butter. Nothing worked.

Instead of going to school the next day, Daddy took me to see our town’s doctor, Doctor Kroeplin. I was very teary-eyed and didn’t appreciate Daddy teasing me that maybe the doctor would give me a ‘schtee’, to make me feel better. The much dreaded ‘Schtee’ was his word for medicine given with a needle.

At the office, Doctor Kroeplin told Daddy, “Kathy needs her tonsils taken out to stop her having strep throat. Since she has a hard time swallowing the penicillin pills, I can just give her a penicillin shot instead.”

I almost passed out when I heard the doctor tell Daddy this. Not only did I need surgery, but before leaving the office, I was going to get a ‘schtee’ in a place I usually kept covered!

After any visit to the doctor, Daddy took us to the nearby grocery store to buy an ice cream treat to make us feel better. As we drove home, I slowly licked my orange push-up and allowed the cool, sweet treat to slide down my painful throat. Where I was given the ‘schtee’ was painful, but I felt so relieved we didn’t have to get the poisonous penicillin pills from Stratford’s Helstrom Drug store.

At home, Daddy told Mom, “The doctor said that when Kathy is well, and after school is out for the summer, she needs surgery to have her tonsils removed.”

Hearing what the doctor had said again, made me realize the surgery was really going to happen. Feeling sorry for myself, I cried, saying with pathetic drama, “Why is this happening to me?”

My brother Billy, who was ten years older, countered my self-centered whine with, “Why not you? This happens to a lot of people.” He was determined to not allow me to wallow in self-pity. 

Stunned by his words, I felt instant shame. He was right. Why not me? Sad and scary things happen to everyone.

The memory of that day and my brother’s comment has stuck with me all the many years since then. I consider his words a mental ‘schtee’ that inoculated me for life against self-pity.