WHAT'S MISSING?

My oldest memory of being sick dates to a pre-school age. Don't have a clue what my particular brand of illness was, but I remember my sick bed was a pallet in the living room (next to mom/dad's bedroom). I know it was Christmas time, because through blurry vision, I could tell that brightly colored lights were on a tree in the corner. Unfortunately, my "illness" lasted through the holiday season with my feverish brain retaining no memory but the weird noel in the living room.

When I was near the first grade, my entire family got "food poisoning". We all laid around like zombies feeling near death with any movement bringing waves of nausea.

With three kids in the house, we all got the childhood diseases at the same time. These maladies included chicken pox and measles which covered us from head to toe with bumps, scabs, and itchy-scaly skin. To complete the ensemble, Mom would take a cotton ball and daub us end to end with pink calamine lotion. I don't remember the calamine accomplishing anything, but we looked like aliens from Mars for a few days. That dried lotion made our hair stick out nice and spiky as well?

Mumps were fun with swollen glands making us look like baboons.

We had the flu, viruses, rip-roarin' diarrhea, ear aches, serious mashed fingers in car doors, and even fire crackers that decided to implode our sweaty palms.

We also enjoyed our share of country "wounds". I stepped on a board one time that had a rusty nail sticking up. The nailed pierced the sole of my shoe and then the top of my shoe (guess what choice filet was between those two sections?) That fiasco resulted in getting my foot soaked in a basin of kerosene (at least it was a semi-refined carcinogen?).

I got a "black eye" one time that swelled the entire side of my face and turned purple. That earned a bit of cold round steak applied to the puckered/bruised flesh that obliterated my eye.

On one fated day, I was on the top of a steel ladder that was braced upright in the middle of someones yard. The bracing was angle iron pieces held together with clamps. The clamps slipped, the steel edifice crashed, and the ladder whacked across the top of one of my feet like an elephant squashin' a bug. My foot swelled the size of a football. That resulted in merely laying around on the couch for a few days while enjoying the bounty of our single channel (Tyler) on the black/white TV in our living room.

I could go on a bit with bugs, diseases, wounds, and such, but this is as good a time as any to ask, "What's missing?"

Answer: Not so much as one time in the 19 years that I lived with my parents were any of us EVER taken to a doctor for any reason.

OK, now this wasn't for lack of parental love or caring. Our folks never had medical insurance. They had no money for anything but a few groceries. And likely, they had a bit of mistrust for the medical profession that extremely poor people seem to engender?

Bottom line, my sisters and I not only survived the lack of Rx in our lives, we thrived and did well. I guess as long as "the good Lord" ain't the answer to, "What's missing?" in one's life, a body can survive near bout anything?