As I enjoyed a leisure moment with a crossword the other
day, both a mug of coffee and a snoozing cat within reach, a clue in my puzzle -- “old time anesthetic” -- gave me a bit of a shock. The answer easily
worked out to “ether” but I have terrible memories of ether, you see…and, most
importantly, did all this make me “old-time
” too?
I’d recently seen a movie with Richard Widmark (first clue
that I actually might be old---how many remember him?) made two years before I
was born in which, portraying a troubled surgeon, he toiled in a dim operating
room that had nothing plugged in.
There were no glowing monitors, screens or
beeping machines anywhere in sight. Besides a patient on the table, there was a
doctor with a scalpel and a nurse in high heels and a winged white cap. They
might as well have been wearing animal skins; the doctor cutting open his
patient with the jaw bone of a mastodon. Upon realizing that I’d entered the
world just 24 months later, I was horrified. How did we survive without all the
equipment that checks all the equipment that checks us? Was there even electricity
in the delivery room?
 |
| Actual operating room from the 1950s. |
And now, the Times’ Crossword Editor is smugly referring to
something I vividly remember as “old.” What in the name of Marcus Welby (clue
#2) is going on here??
 |
| I'm pretty sure this was my nurse. |
Based on the then accepted medical trend of yanking tonsils
willy nilly out of small children, my mother decided that, at the age of three,
mine needed to go. And, while I cannot remember if I’ve eaten breakfast, I can
actually tell you all about how I was blind folded, thrown into the trunk of a
car and driven to a tonsillectomy mill somewhere in Brooklyn. Once there, I was
terrorized by a staff of supposed medical personnel straight out of a Bette
Davis (clue 3) movie once she got old and was relegated to playing lunatics who
loved pushing invalids down flights of stairs.
Taken into a large room
with nothing but a padded table in the center and placed upon it, it was from
this vantage point I accessed my captors. Uncertain as how to handle this
mystifying abandonment by a mother I’d entirely trusted until this very moment,
I spotted the only other thing in the room---on the floor, in a corner, was a small,
innately terrifying brown glass bottle with a rubber dropper cap. My strategy
immediately became clear.
 |
| True story. |
I morphed from a docile
victim into a small feral animal intent upon escape. Leaping from the table, I
ran from corner to corner eluding the doctor whose lower face was already
obscured by a surgical mask but was soon caught and strapped down.
The scary bottle
was uncapped and a washcloth was placed over my face into which was squeezed
dropperfuls of what I later learned was the “old-time anesthetic” that now fit
into the five spaces of seven across in my crossword puzzle. I soon blacked out
but later awoke to find that my tonsils had been stolen. My mother later tried
to appease me with unlimited ice cream but, inexplicably, never apologized for
either the abduction or subsequent tonsil-snatching.
 |
| Don't be curious, George. Run! |
As we all know from watching
Grey’s Anatomy, medicine is no longer Richard Widmark and a nurse wearing a pointy
bra (clue 4). It’s high tech and magical and anesthetic is no longer
administered by a deranged hobo in need of a few bucks for his next bottle of
rot gut.
The irony of my tonsil removal by sadists who, likely, had no medical
degrees, is that as the only regenerative tissue in the body, if tonsils are
not properly removed, they will grow back. And, guess what--mine did.
So, friends, when you
come across that word in a crossword, think of a tiny Susan Says cowering in a
corner and begging for mercy. You can send money for psychotherapy care of this
newspaper.Thank you in advance.
*Okay, I wasn’t
blindfolded and thrown into the trunk. Everything else in this memory is
accurate.
 |
| Hello, I'm Marcus Welby! |
