The Other Side of This Life

One of the benefits of going to a large teaching hospital in the 1950s was that no matter what was wrong with you, you stood a fighting chance that somebody there knew how to treat it—or at least had heard of whatever was wrong with you.

On the other hand, one of the major drawbacks was that it was a teaching hospital and, consequently, had all these students and interns hanging about the place.

You’d be in your bed, innocently trying to get the screen of your Etch-a-Sketch^® completely black, and suddenly you would be surrounded by a herd of student doctors, led by a professor explaining the subtle indications and finer points of a knee/ankle/elbow/whatever bleed.

For some reason, they always felt the need to draw the curtains around your bed. Then they’d stand there grinning at you. They’d ask a few tentative questions and earnestly note the answers. Sometimes they’d poke at the joint, like it was a suspect tomato, or put their hand on it and be...

One day when I was in second or third grade, one of the girls got up for Show and Tell to show us her new skirt. It was dark blue and had enough pleats in it to make an accordion jealous. It turned out that was what she wanted to show and tell us about.

For reasons beyond us boys, she was very happy that she could hold both sides out like a fan and the front and back still covered her knobby little knees. We boys were fairly happy about that, too.

The girls were very impressed, but most of the guys were thinking about playing marbles or wondering if the playground was dry enough to play some softball during lunch. We were several years away from that age when a young lady showing us her legs was … interesting.  But then one of the guys behind me whispered, “Hey, Guy, show ‘em your knee.”

I was in the third or fourth week of a routine knee bleed. At that point, the bleeding was pretty much over and I was in that long, slow stage where the blood was being...