I Was a Very Sick Baby

     I talked a little about traditions in my last post about Getting Ready for Christmas, but I left out one tradition. Every year at Christmas, we tell the story of how I almost died when I was two.


Who Would Have Helped Sort the Laundry?
 

     I was a very sick baby. If I remember some of the things my mom has told me over the years, I was constantly getting sick, so that every time I would gain a little weight, I would get sick and lose it. I was very small as a baby and as a child.

     So the year that I turned two, my mom was really looking forward to Christmas because it would be the first year that I was really aware of what was going on and interested in what Santa brought me. And Santa had brought me some really cool stuff, including a rocking horse.

     That morning, my mom woke me up, and I'm pretty sure she got out a movie camera, the kind with reels that you had to send off to get developed and run on a projector. This was the height of 1979 technology. She says that I looked around, sat on the rocking horse, climbed on the couch and didn't show much interest at all. (I not so secretly anymore believe that she blames me a little still, even though I couldn't help I was sick. There's always a hint of bitterness in her voice when she tells this story. I'm just saying.)

How Can You Blame This Face for Anything but Stealing Shoes?

     That night when we went down to my grandmother's house, I was listless and as lifeless as a ragdoll. My mom asked her sister's then husband, who happened to be a doctor, and he told her that I was very sick and needed to go to the emergency room.

     I had pneumonia, and I was NOT running a fever. That was worse because my tiny body was not able to fight off the infection by itself. I spent a good bit of time in the hospital in an oxygen tent with people reading books to me. I was so tiny that I apparently fit my entire self with room for another to join me, at least their head and upper body, in the oxygen tent. My mom even sent out for books because she got tired of reading the same ones, but her least favorite, and my absolute favorite, were the Dr. Seuss books.

     I honestly think that my food allergies stretch back to infancy because I remember just never really feeling good, and sometimes just feeling downright terrible, and I was always getting in trouble for not eating, even when I knew it was something that made me feel bad. I look back, and I'm sure that I've always been lactose intolerant because I could always belch louder and longer after drinking milk than I ever could while drinking soda. (We're talking epic burps that could leave me breathless.) And I was formula fed, and I had nasty rashes. Plus I itched all the time, just a mild low-grade constant itch over my entire body that persisted until I took out my food allergens.

     I was constantly getting upper respiratory infections, which is probably what led to the pneumonia. And I'm not trying to place blame anywhere, even though I know my mom feels partly responsible. She shouldn't. It was a  different time, and you just didn't hear a lot about food allergies. I don't remember a single person with a peanut allergy, even though it turns out that I had a slight peanut allergy the entire time. I think I only remember one or two people getting the allergy test when I was a child, and I was not one of them. We thought we knew all the things I was allergic to: grass, codeine, garlic, and acetaminophen. But in the last two or three years of my study of allergies, I've concluded that a lot of what was wrong with me as a baby, child, teen, and young adult had one common factor, and that is food allergies.

The Hardee's Hat Doesn't Lie

     I'm not saying that I wouldn't have gotten pneumonia back then if I hadn't been eating the Standard American Diet or SAD for short, but I like to think that I would have been a little healthier. Maybe I would have at least ran a fever to try to help my body fight the infection.  I am saying that I grew up on a typical Southern diet. Breakfast was grits and eggs or cereal and milk. Lunch was usually a PB&J because I was literally addicted to them. And dinner was....well, I've always said that my dad is so OCD about food that if I could remember what I had for dinner, I could tell you what day of the week something happened. And there was always bread and milk and endless sweet tea, and Thursday night was always beans, bacon, and banana sandwiches. And of course, we ate lots of fast food, not as much as most people eat these days, but we went at least once a week. It was mommy-daughter bonding time when my mom didn't have to cook, and I would actually eat, no matter how bad it made me feel. That poop is tasty.