After my tonsillectomy surgery was over, but before I was fully awake, two nurses put me on a cart and returned me to my room in the pediatric unit. I drowsily noticed that Mom and Daddy and my brother Billy were in the room waiting for me. Mom brushed the bangs off my forehead. Daddy stood quietly watching me with love in his eyes. At the foot of the bed, Billy discovered that the blanket covering me covered everything but one foot. Doing what was instinctive as a brother, he reached down and tickled my foot. My instinctive reaction was to pull back my knee like a piston and transfered all my energy into a well-placed kick.

More than a year earlier, I came down with a sore throat. This sore throat was different than any other sore throat I’d ever had. Besides being very painful, it seemed as though I couldn’t swallow anything. When Mom told me to open my mouth so she could take a look, she gasped, “Your tonsils are so swollen, they are nearly touching! I’m going to take you to see Doctor Kroeplin in Stratford.”

Mom’s reaction scared me; I cried. Then I got the mirror from the bathroom to look at my own throat. I saw two huge, red, shiny lumps of inflamed flesh covered with white streaks. They didn’t look like they belonged where they were. When Doctor Kroeplin looked in my throat, he said, “Kathy has strep throat. If it isn’t treated with penicillin, she could get rheumatic fever.” The large, bitter pills he prescribed needed to be taken daily.

I gagged easily and found swallowing pills impossible to do. To complicate things, penicillin pills taste terrible. Mom was desperate to get them into me because of what the doctor said. She tried to hide them in spoonfuls of apple sauce. The apple sauce went down, but I gagged out the bitter pill. Orange juice was a rare treat in our house, so she got some, thinking it would help me swallow the pills. I spit up the juice along with the pill onto the kitchen linoleum. I ended up having to go back to see the doctor to be given a penicillin shot in my rump. As much as I didn’t like that, it was better than swallowing pills.

I came down with swollen tonsils and strep throat more than once that year. Doctor Kroeplin told Mom, “Kathy needs to get her tonsils taken out. If she doesn’t, she’ll keep getting strep.” I was scared and cried like a big baby.

My surgery was planned for after school let out that year. Before I could properly enjoy the summer vacation, I was examined by Doctor Rivers at the Marshfield clinic in preparation for the surgery. Then, the afternoon before they took my tonsils out, I was admitted to the pediatric floor in the hospital. Trying to make me feel better, Mom told me, “Your roommate has a TV.” What I heard was, “Your roommate has TB.”

Young as I was, I knew about tuberculosis. I was ready to run screaming from the hospital. I exclaimed, “Isn’t that catching?!” Mom laughed and said, “No. You don’t understand. She has a television!” That should have made me feel better since we didn’t even have a television at home. It barely registered in my panic-stricken mind. That evening, every time I got up to go to the bathroom, I had trouble finding my way back to my room. There were so many doorways! Then, when I did find my room again, I’d discover that the nurse had remade my bed while I was gone. That really creeped me out!

In the morning, I was moved onto a cart and wheeled to surgery. On the surgical table a nurse put a mask over my nose and mouth. I struggled and turned my head away from it, sputtering, “That mask smells like the wart medicine my brother is using on his foot.”

Someone spoke into my ear, “That smell is ether, the medicine that will make you go to sleep. The doctor needs you to be asleep so he can take out your tonsils. When you wake up, the surgery will be over.”

My fight or flight defense mechanisms had been activated by everything that happened after stepping into the hospital: my fear of contagion, feeling suffocated by breathing in the ether, the strangeness of being away from home, and the frightening dreams that ether gave me while I was trapped within its power. So, when my brother tickled my bare foot before I was totally awake, I defended myself in the only way I could. Yelling at him with my sore throat was out of the question. Pulling my knee up, I quickly kicked as hard as I could. My foot made solid contact with my nineteen-year-old brother’s midriff. The “Oomph!” sound that he made, gave me far more satisfaction than any pain medication could have.