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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_spotted_fever |
When I was 18 years old, I almost died from a tick bite. My college boyfriend was visiting Rockland with me, and we were going back to school on a slow difficult bus ride through the mountains of upstate New York, with stomachs full of my mom's spaghetti and meatball dinner. After the second time I threw up, the bus driver began telling students that someone was sick on the bus before they got on, so they could weigh their options on the staircase. Later, my idiot boyfriend would tell me that he finally knew he was "in love" with me when he realized that he was more worried about my health than being embarrassed by the smell of vomit, which didn't dispel any of my notions about his relative immaturity in comparison to mine.
It was so serious that I couldn't make it back up the hill to campus, after the bus dropped us off in Oneonta. We had to crash at his brother's downtown apartment above "The Black Oak Tavern" that he shared with his hipster girlfriend, arranged by my boyfriend on a payphone while I sat on a suitcase waiting for his brother to let us in. Their "crash pad" was exactly what you'd expect from them as a couple: one big exposed brick wall, with arty black-and-white partially nude photographs taken of his girlfriend in very favorable angles hanging on the other walls, and an acoustic guitar resting in its stand in the corner, just in case you missed every other cue that you were around seriously "arty" types. I had to stay there for at least a day or two to regain my strength for the bus ride back up to campus.
Once there, I immediately went back to bed. My best friend and my boyfriend took me to the health center on campus the next day. We were told that I simply had the flu, and if we would have believed them, it would have been of horrible consequence to me for the rest of my life. But (thank goodness for our college arrogance), we didn't listen to some young, rather dumb, and woefully underpaid healthcare aide working in a remote hick town, because I wasn't getting any better, and I couldn't hold down food or water. My roommate called my mom from the dorm's pay phone to keep her abreast of my condition (which was hard for us to do, because we budgeted our precious quarters for laundry use), and she asked her to take my temperature regularly.
She called back with the results, saying it was high, and that she couldn't even stay in her own dorm room because it smelled so bad from vomit. Touching, eh? But, that's exactly the way it was for us back then; too much sympathy directed attention away from you that could make the difference as to whether or not you also went down, and we didn't want that for any one of us. We fought hard to stay alive. After another few days, my mom made the important decision to pick me up from school and take me to see a real doctor, my childhood pediatrician Dr. Dreyer. She still counts it as one of her great acts of mercy towards me, that she interrupted her busy life to care for me this one last time. If she had refused to do so, I'd be dead or seriously impaired right now. So, thanks for not letting me die...I guess.
That must seem cruel to you now, as a younger generation raised to believe that you might hold all of the potential of a magical golden statue, priceless in your own estimation, but that's not how my parents saw it then, or how they see it now. Pragmatism ruled the day for working class religious families, because tragedies happened every day. That's the way it was (is). They had an "heir to spare" (in their own words), because they already had two male sons to carry on the family name and inherit any property or family assets through their future children. I was considered a mistake, because my mom didn't want to get pregnant so soon after my brother was born, and yet here I am writing to you today. It's rather miraculous, when you think about it.
I was so weak that I couldn't walk down the flights of stairs from the dorm's third floor, so my strong young boyfriend wrapped me up in a blanket and carried me downstairs in the harsh cold weather to my mom's car, putting me into the passenger seat. She'd arranged a makeshift garbage bag in the car for me to get sick in, which I did throughout the trip home, even though I had nothing in my stomach. I'd never been so sick in my life. When I got home to my mother's house, I could barley walk the small steps from my childhood room to the bathroom we all shared as kids, and that was barely four steps away.
I felt like I had really bad arthritis, because every joint in my body ached. In between fever dreams, I had to steady myself against the wall with shaky hands just to make it a few steps, and that was becoming harder to do with each day that passed. I felt like I was dying. My mom got me to see my childhood doctor right away, and he diagnosed me with one look, because I had definitive red target rashes covering my arms, like a textbook case of tick bites. He took a blood sample, but prescribed antibiotics for me to start right away, before the test came back, because beating this disease meant that time was of the essence. If the disease settled into my bones, I would have been crippled for life, because it meant we waited too long to start a course of treatment. We later surmised that I'd been exposed to deer ticks walking the wooded path from campus to town, and that the bite site was somewhere on my head, which we never found, because I had a crop of big curly 80s hair to rival Bon Jovi's back then.
Of course, Dr. Dreyer was right, because he's the best doctor I have ever seen in my life. He came from an Observant Orthodox Jewish family, a kind and fiercely intelligent man who often had Hasidic families in his waiting room. They seemed even more scared than we were of being sick, because their exposure to the outside world was so rare. They'd established a successful religious community in Monsey called "New Square", and they were attacked often enough that it didn't help their communication with the outside world. They sat silent and mute, apart from us by worlds and centuries. Still, I admired his commitment to their devoted families, because they were often biased against by seemingly rational doctors who defied their advanced education with superstitious beliefs.
My mom told me he was a great man for tending to them. They were often on welfare and vastly underage, in comparison to our more sophisticated and educated families, which meant that he charged them a sliding fee for their office visits that they desperately needed, because like strict Catholics, their young women didn't use birth control. I always liked that about him, and today I remember him with you during this High Holy week. Thank you, Dr. Dreyer! !חג פסח שמח
