Get Well Soon, Tonsil Operation
You’ll get all the Jello and ice cream you can eat!
When I was six years old, I started first grade. And immediately picked up every bug that was going around — constant tonsillitis and anemia.
The only thing for it, the doctor said, was to take my tonsils out.
Well, that and weekly penicillin shots. Back then, they thought of penicillin as a vitamin and doled it out whether you needed it or not.
Getting my tonsils out meant three days in the hospital and a break from school, which I hated with the kind of creeping dread usually reserved for long prison sentences or indenture in the Foreign Legion. So I happily acquiesced.
Plus I was promised all the Jello and ice-cream I could eat, so what could go wrong?
The day before my surgery, my mother drove me to the hospital and checked me in, helped me change into my pajamas, bought special for this occasion. They came with a matching robe and flimsy slippers.
I was the luckiest girl alive!
Even better, I had a roommate! Lisa was eight and, therefore, much more worldly and cool than I. She was also an only child, so her parents spent lots and lots of time by her bedside, while my parents had a bunch of people to look after at home.
After Mum left, Lisa and I went to explore the ward, looking into other rooms and the broom closet. At a certain point, Lisa noticed that I wasn’t wearing my slippers.
“You have to wear them,” she told me. “The nurse said!”
“But we’re in a hospital,” I argued. “Everything’s clean!!!”
Then I looked at the bottom of my feet.
By the time we got back to our room, it was time for dinner. We ate in bed, which was kind of cool since we weren’t actually sick.
“Make sure you eat it all up,” the nurse warned. “You’ll get nothing to eat or drink after midnight!”
I did what I was told, making especially sure to get every last bit of Jello. That was, after all the whole reason I was there.
After dinner, we went to the playroom where we played Chutes and Ladders and, wonder of pink confectionery wonders, Candyland.
I was getting pretty tired by this point.
My usual bedtime at home was 7:30, and we were inching round to eight o’clock. I felt guilty about staying up so late without my mother’s permission, but Lisa assured me that it was fine.
“The nurses have to clean our room before we get back,” she said, doubtless confusing the hospital with some nice hotel she and her parents had stayed in on vacation.
The TV was on, and we all gathered round to watch Laugh-In, which I wasn’t allowed to watch at home, but once again, it was what the nurses wanted us to do.
I don’t know if the room was overheated or it was just the fire of my guilt that made me so sweaty, but I discarded my little bathrobe for the fast dancing and drank up all my water when we were finally allowed back to our room.
It had been a marvelous evening.
Wasn’t getting your tonsils out the best thing ever, we asked each other in glee before falling happily asleep.
The next morning we were rolled out to surgery.
And lying on the operating table with the largest array of lights I had ever seen looming above me, I began to wonder just how much Jello would make this all worth it.
The anesthetist put a mask over my face and my nostrils filled with an awful smell.
“You have to breathe,” he said.
I shook my head. “It stinks!”
He muttered impatiently, and a nurse stepped forward.
“Just breathe out,” she coached me. “Blow that bad smell away!”
Thinking I was getting away with something and with no real idea of how breathing worked, I gave a few almighty exhales and didn’t notice that I had to breathe in to do it again.
And the world went dark.
The rest of that day is a complete blur.
The pain in my throat was so bad I couldn’t swallow.
“Just gob in a Kleenex,” Lisa had croaked. She was brilliant!
In the evening, I fell into a sweaty slumber.
When I woke up, Lisa was pointing to a light just above my bed. It took me a while to realize that I had rolled over onto my call button and summoned the nurse.
Who was not at all pleased to be called from her important work to the bedside of a little girl who refused to even swallow. She gave a handful of tissues to Lisa and a handful to me and told us that when they were gone, we’d be on our own.
“Anything else?” she demanded.
“I want to go home,” I croaked, tearfully.
“You can’t go home until tomorrow. I’m not calling your mother now.” Then she rolled me over, gave me a spank, and left the room.
“She’s a bitch,” whispered Lisa, and I gave her a wavering smile in agreement.
In the morning, as promised, my mother arrived to take me home.
And when I got home, there was, indeed, a plethora of Jello and ice cream, all of which I dismissed sadly with a wave of my hand.
My mother installed me on the couch in the living room, with a blanket and a bell.
My sister Chris had bought me one of those magic write-on pads that you just lifted the sheet of plastic to erase, and it was the most brilliant present ever. I could write notes to people and order them about. Or, if I wanted some quiet time, I could just pretend I’d forgotten how to spell.
When Chris came home from school that day, she brought with her my homework and a bundle of get well cards that my class had made.
Large sheets of tea-paper had been intricately folded into quarters which any grown-up would have known meant there were three, possibly four surfaces on which to draw, if you insisted on using the back. But my classmates were a thrifty bunch, and most of them filled up all eight squares. Sequencing was difficult to ascertain. And a lot of the crayon rubbed off from one image to another.
But their hearts were in the right place.
The teacher had taken questions from the audience and written on the board how to spell such difficult words as “tonsil,” “operation,” and “hospital.”
It never occurred to her to spell my name for them. So while the cards impeccably wished a “Get Well Soon Tonsil Operation”, the shout-outs went to “Barbera”, “Boppera”, “Brabra” and the family favorite, “Brbu”. My brother Kevin still calls me that, along with the full blessing of “Your pisher hag on te whol”
See, we had had our class pictures taken a few weeks back, and they’d been delivered while I was in hospital and the teacher had put up a display and how could anyone not decipher what that meant?
But somehow, in my family, it became shorthand for “Thank you, you’re lovely, and I’ll remember this wonderful thing you’ve done for all eternity.”
I became a deeply suspicious child after that. Whenever my parents tried to coax me to do something I didn’t want to do, I would give them a grim-eyed stare.
“All the Jello and ice cream you can eat,” they’d mutter, knowing they had lost the fight.
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