But this post isn't about tonsils, which are kind of unsightly and boring; it's about my first encounter with adults outside of family and school. . . .
The entire hospital experience is one I recall of dim greys and poorly lit rooms, almost a black-and-white TV version of how a hospital would appear back then. I don't remember the surgeon; I didn't meet him on the operating table (ha-ha), but I did meet the anesthesiologist beforehand. His name was Doctor Gilbert and we were practically neighbors. Doctor Gilbert lived just two blocks away from me, and his sons and I attended the same school but we were in different grades and didn't play together. Doctor Gilbert seemed friendly enough but a little large and intimidating. He said in a kindly though deep authoritarian voice that he would be giving me something called "ether." I had some type of rubber mask held over my nose and mouth. Dr. Gilbert then had me count a flight of stairs, the ones from my hallway to the basement. I actually saw a spiral and a grey depth of field, an encompassing thickness like falling into a vat of mud. The lights became increasingly haloed and blurred. Could not count.... spiral... voices fading...
The next thing I remember I'd been moved to a nursery following the surgery. There were other children. I couldn't sleep that night after having my tonsils removed. I recall a darkened nursery room with several cribs and the hazy globes of light suspended above the nurse's station. The nurse would make her rounds and I watched an Asian boy next to me cry when the nurse thrust a thermometer up his rectum. (This would also be done to me). I felt hopelessly frightened and alone. My throat ached and I couldn't fall asleep so I would stand up in the crib and whine and the nurse would come and force me back down. I could feel frustration in her body but didn't understand why the frustration was being directed at me. She would stick the thermometer up my ass, which didn't hurt enough for me to cry but was still uncomfortably painful.
I was experiencing adult cruelty for the first time. The nurse was gruff and somewhat physically cruel, but in a professional way that I'm sure was perfectly acceptable back then. I guess my first-grade teacher was also cruel, but her cruelty was more of a tyrannical mental cruelty with the intention of instilling fear and therefore a mistaken idea of respect from her students. I was in a strange place, a hospital, and where were my parents? Why couldn't I go home? Why couldn't I sleep in my own bed? I'm sure all of that had been explained to me, but I didn't really understand, only being six.
My parents came to take me home the following afternoon and I spent a week in my pajamas recovering with the aid of ice cream. I did get homework sent to me so I wouldn't fall too far behind, and my first grade class all sent me get well cards that came with the homework. The cards were a treat, but had only included about two-thirds of my class; the other third were either in the hospital getting their tonsils removed, or home recovering like me. A few might have been out sick.
A couple of weeks after the surgery I received the news that Doctor Gilbert, the Anesthesiologist, had died of a heart attack. He was only 39 years old. Who really knows what happened or what had triggered his death---the state of his health, stress, depression, diet, heredity, alcoholism, whatever. All I was told was that he'd died of a heart attack, and men dropping dead that young wasn't particularly uncommon. I immediately thought of his kids (I believe there were five) losing their father.
And I felt weird and confused. In my six-year-old mind I conflated Doctor Gilbert dying of a heart attack with having given me ether and putting me under. My mother insisted there'd been no connection between these two events, but a child has a limited temporal cognition and doesn't form boundaries or clear linear spaces between two events, and because anethesia was a new and mildly scary experience in itself, linked to death and unconsciousness, a little mock death, it wasn't surprising that I would think the anesthesiologist had also died, had entered permanent unconsciousness because of ether, an occupational hazard so to speak. We'd had something of a pact in our study of unconsciouness, but Doctor Gilbert wouldn't be coming back from his and I sadly sensed the loss. I probably would not have seen him again, but a doctor-patient intimacy had been established. I trusted him (I'd had little choice), I saw us as partners in this strange experience, and to some degree I must have reminded him of his own children. Did he have any foreknowledge or hint of his own mortality at that point?
The pain of losing tonsils took less than a week but my early experience of these two adults took longer. With a dim knowledge of them, I filed the nurse and Doctor Gilbert away with having been in a deep aleep, with the moving spiral, with the ether.
