#48 Growing up healthy in the 1950s
In Spanish class last night we were talking about the way they used to line us up at school for vaccinations. Then this morning I read that about 1/4 of American children do not receive their proper immunizations at the right time, and a web site is being developed to remind them. This got me thinking about growing up healthy.

When I was a child I was vaccinated for small pox, polio (when it became available) and diphtheria. I had chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and multiple incidents of tonsillitis until my tonsils were removed.

I played outdoors with my friends whenever weather permitted. I had no allergies. I never had a broken bone, or even a sprain. I didn’t inhale second hand smoke (after 1949 when Dad quit) or suffer any animal bites. I was never in an automobile accident, not even a fender bender. I never had an accidental poisoning, food poisoning, a bee or wasp sting, or poison ivy.

I never had an ear ache or cold sore. I didn’t have an eating disorder (we’d never heard of them until the 1960s). Some of my fillings are older than my dentist who is 50 years old, but I still have all my permanent teeth, even my wisdom teeth. I didn’t wear glasses or a hearing aid.

My parents didn’t own a television until I was in college. No one brought guns or knives to school in our little town, although we did have bullies in the 1940s and 1950s. As a teen-ager, I didn’t drink and didn’t smoke and neither did my friends. Drugs were something we thought were used only by poor people who had no future. I was never assaulted by a boy. I never knew a person who committed suicide until I was in my 30s.

Serious mishaps were missed by an inch. I almost drowned in 1948 because I didn’t know how to swim and slipped off a raft when no adults were around. I was shot in the face with a BB gun by my brother when I was 7. My horse fell on me when I was 12.

I didn’t know I had a learning disability until after I had a master’s degree. I never took the SAT, ACT or the GRE, which is good because I‘m a terrible test taker. I didn’t find out until I was 57 that my heart’s electrical system had been misfiring my entire life and that I could have had a stroke or died without warning.

If there is an angel of good health, we’ve been walking arm in arm and I hope he sticks around.