memoir

Women’s Health Week Revisited – Diabetes and It Takes A Family by Author Linda Bethea RN

Reblog from Smorgasbord. Thanks, Sally.

My Dead Aunt’s Coat ( from Memoirs of The Great Depression)

Reblogging.excerpt from Everything Smells Just Like Pole Salad.  Book available in paperback and Kindle edition now.

lbeth1950's avatarNutsrok

imageNot long after Aunt Ellie’s funeral, Cousin Katie brought her faded, old plum-colored coat to Mama.  “Mr. Blizzard bought this for Aunt Ellie years ago.  The material is real good.  It won’t fit me. Do you want to make it over for one of your girls?

“I sure do.  The cuffs on Kathleen’s coat are over her wrists.  I ‘ve been trying to figure out how I could come up with some heavy material.  This should do good, if you’re sure you can’t use it.”

That caught my attention. I hated that camphor-smelling old coat.  I’d seen skinny, old Aunt Ellie wrapped up head to ankles in that faded old coat, puttering around in the yard or sitting wrapped in it next to the stove on cold days.  The front was spotted and the cuffs slick with age and wear.  I imagined myself creeping around in that worn-out coat, looking…

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Don’t Fence Me In

image imageDaddy was an equal opportunity employer, not that I was grateful. I got to work right alongside him and my brother.  He had forty acres to fence.  That’s a mile of fence. He enlisted his free help, Bill and me. He cleared the right of  way.   We came in really handy for piling the brush and loading  the posts he’d made from the timber. After he dug the post holes with an augur behind his tractor,  we plodded along behind the trailer dropping posts in the holes,

i was totally surprised at the generous offer  he made once all the posts were dropped and we surveued the crooked mile of posts.  “I’ll give you a mickel apiece for every post you set and tamp.  I did a quick calculation.  That would only be about twenty-six dollars to split for the whole miserable job. It didn’t take either us long to turn down that opportunity.

He was ready for us.  Okay, then do it for nothing.  I want it finished this week so we can start stringing wire Saturday.  It was finished.  Saturday morning we were out there with him stretching wire.  I didn’t like that a bit better.

Slight Error!

imageMy nephew, Josh, came shrieking in the house looking for his mom and dad.  “Help! Help!  There’s a giant black weirdo in the front yard!”

Fearing he’d been accosted by a pervert or a child molester, they ran out ready to defend their little guy.  There was nobody there.

“Son, there’s nobody here!” his dad reassured him.  “Exactly what did you see?”

Excitedly, Josh pointed out a hole in the yard.  “A huge spider!  A black weirdo!  He ran down in here!”

 

 

The Joy of Nursing

Early in my nursing career, I cared for Betsy Mercer, a young mother of six and seven-year-old boys who had lost her baby when the placenta detached before delivery.  She was catastrophically ill, suffering every complication. I dialyzed her for weeks while she was on the ventilator in ICU as she went from bad to worse to worse.  The only thing in her favor was her previous good health and the fact that she was a mother.  As a mother, I identified with the grief she’d feel at the loss of her little girl when she finally regained consciousness, and regretful that two little boys were likely to lose their loving mother.  I sang to Betsy and talked to her as though we were friends every day.  “Betsy, Your husband brought these pictures of your boys today.  They are so cute.  He said they miss you but Grandma Sweet is getting them to and from school.  Joey made you this bracelet and Kerry drew you a picture of your family.  He drew you the biggest.  He must really love you.”

I put the bracelet in her wrist every day when I was with her and posted the kid’s art where she could see it when she was turned to the left.  Patients who can’t move are repositioned often to keep their skin healthy and to help prevent pneumonia.  Late one Thusday I finished my shift and told Betsy I’d but would see her Tuesday morning after my long weekend, though I had little hope she’d be there.

I went back to the ICU to check on Betsy before my shift Tuesday morning.  My heart fell when I saw someone else in her room.  I felt just awful till I asked her nurse when she’d died.

“Oh, Betsy rallied midday Friday. She didn’t need dialysis and got off the ventilator Saturday night.  By Monday, she was so much better, she moved out to the obstetrical floor.

I was ecstatic at her recovery, and meant to visit her in her room, but didn’t get up there.  About six weeks later, a beautiful young woman stopped off at our unit to visit.  It was Betsy, fully recovered come to pay her caregivers a visit.  I’d never have known her.  It was such a joy to see her returned to health and her family.  It’s days like these that keep nurses coming back.

 

 

Vital Info for Your Health

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Children in the twenties, thirties, and forties were looking kelt to have to wear asfoetida bags around their necks to ward off illness.  The foul-smelling asfoetida was likely to placed in a discarded tobacco bag like the one pictured above.

I found near this article about asfoetida on OurValley.org

Monday, January 14, 2013
Maybe it’s time for asafeotida bags
By Meg Hibbert
Maybe it’s time to break out the asafeotida bags to ward off the flu.

Doctors, hospitals and medical personnel all over – especially in Virginia – are saying this week that the flu epidemic right now is huge. The word is that local hospitals are getting overloaded with flu cases. Staff on Tuesday said Richfield Retirement Center’s residents in the Recovery and Care Center are quarantined to their rooms and residential floors, instead of being allowed to go to the cafeteria.

Maybe we should all try wearing asafetida bags.

Unless you grew up in the 1940s, 1950s and were raised in the rural South, you might not ever have heard of asafetida or asafoetida, which as a kid, I thought was probably spelled assafettidy.

When I was little, I remember a few country kids in Tifton, Ga., coming to school with little cloth bags of onion-smelling gunky stuff on string around their necks. Asafetida was supposed either supposed to cure you of colds and other sickness, or to keep germs away.

It kept the rest of us away, that’s for sure.

According to my quick research yesterday, some people thought asafetida would keep away flu, or even polio. After the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that killed almost 100 million people, according to the book “Healing Spices,” pharmacies used to sell “asafidity” and “asafidity bags.”

Internet research says asafetida is a bitter, gummy resin made of a fennel-type of plant that is native to the Middle East and similar parts of the world. The name is derived from “asa gum” and the Latin word “foetidus” for evil-smelling.

I do remember the stuff smelled really bad.

The “Davesgarden.com” site has a posting by Bev Walker who says scientists took a new look at asafetida, and found it had antiviral properties.

In addition to the herb powder, asafetida was frequently mixed with garlic, onions and other herbs people believed had healing qualities.

I didn’t have a granny who made us wear I had an asafetida bag so I’m certainly no expert. I do remember finding a lacy metal open-work locket that still had some of the dark-brown, gummy stuff dried in it. I thought that was terrific. I wonder what ever happened to it in my childhood treasures.

Anyway, today’s medical experts are encouraging us to get a flu shot if you haven’t already had one, eat healthy, get lots of rest, wash your hands frequently and stay away from sick people.

Since I can’t take flu shots because I was allergic to eggs when I was a baby and flu vaccine is grown on eggs, I usually take my chances with flu. Knock on wood, I’ve only had it twice in the last 13 years. Maybe I’ll just start wearing a couple of cloves of garlic around my neck, instead.

Editor’s note: Since I published this in the printed edition of the Salem Times-Register on Jan. 10, reader Frank Munley sent an article from “Saudi Aramco World” about asafoetida, also known as “Devil’s Dung,” which it called the world’s smelliest spice. Supposedly asafoetida resin – which the article says comes from Ferula assafoetida, a relative of carrol and fennel plants (wonder if it’s related to Queen Anne’s Lace, too?) dropped into olive oil to sauté gives a rich, savory scent similar to sauteéd onions. It is used in pickled dishes and in the West, is an ingredient in Worcestershire sauce. Who knew?

Tags: Afghanistan, asafetida, asafoetida, asafoetida bags, epidemic, fennel, flu, herb, influenza, Kashmir

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2013 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Cookin’, Critters and Chillun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Monday Funnies – Dog Wisdom Memes Final Part (THREE)…

Reblogged from Chris

Aw, Just Take It!

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Interior of vintage pharmacy, similar to Ludwig’s Drug Store

Ludwig’s Drug Store sat smack in the hub of activity of Main Street.  On a busy day, there might be ten or twelve residents going about their business downtown, a couple of them dogs.  Mr Ludwig could easily have been mistaken for Alfred Hitchcock.

The drug store was dark, mysterious, and strange-smelling.  I always imagined the back room held bodies of children who’d gotten into medicine they shouldn’t have,  courtesy of Mother’s warnings to stay out of the medicine cabinet.  Why would they make those Childrens Bayer Aspirin so tempting if they were dangerous?  Ever after my sampling, Mother just cut the big ones down.

I don’t know that I ever heard Mr. Ludwig say more than “That’ll be a dollar twelve cents,” until one of the Bumgadrner kids came in while we were waiting for our order.

“My mama wants a bottle of Asfoetida, and she said put it on the bill,” Freddie Bumgardner announced.

Mr Ludwig got his charge pad out and looked hard at Freddie for just a minute before snapping  it shut.  “Aw just take it.  I ain’t gonna try to spell Bumgardner and Asfoetida in one day!”

Asfoedita is a foul-smelling herb used to treat colic and was put in bags to be hung around the neck to ward of disease in previous generations.  Its foul smell probably kept people at sufficient distance to avoid contagion.

 

 

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