So it seems strange that my mother never had any respect for psychiatrists OR physicians. She believed that "people like us" did not need psychiatrists (how VERY wrong she was!). She called all doctors "quacks," no matter how esteemed they were. She went out of her way to be demeaning about quacks and never valued anything doctors told her. This may have been related to the inability of doctors to save her mother, but it also is typical of her world view about everyone.
My mother often filled prescriptions but then refused to take them, believing each doctor's advice to be ignorant. But it was hardly as if she knew better than they did!
My mother showed no interest in even basic medical concepts, and did not use the correct vocabulary for anything. She would call me daily with her medical concerns, so I was used to this, but even I had to ask what she meant by "my tail wiggled."
My mother had three children. When I was in my 20s, she asked me what a placenta was. I realize times were different in the 50s, but wouldn't most women know this, after three kids?
The alcohol made things worse because my mother could not remember much of anything, from our birthdays to what childhood diseases we'd had. I was the last child, and she remembered the least about me. The effect was a little like being adopted and losing my entire medical history.
My mother had an unerring way of consulting the WORST doctors on the planet, which only fueled her disdain for quacks. I don't know how she found them. She certainly did not check their credentials. When it came to her own medical care, she would shop around until she found a doctor who told her what she wanted to hear. It took her several tries before she found a general practitioner who told her she could keep drinking at her customary level. All of a sudden, THIS doctor's advice was valuable. She called me to report joyfully, "Dr. Bottomofherclass says my liver is perfectly FINE!" I was furious.
Later in life, going to doctors became my mother's preferred form of entertainment. She was careful not to tell the doctors about each other, or to notify one doctor what prescriptions she had received from another. She enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger, hide-and-seek aspect of withholding this information. The doctors would prescribe medications at cross purposes with each other, depending upon which story she told which doctor.
Despite drinking inordinate quantities of alcohol, my mother enjoyed perfect health. She usually had several doctor appointments a week just for fun. She developed macular degeneration, and went to innumerable eye doctors in many different cities in an attempt to find one who would tell her that her eyes were FINE. They were not - but they weren't as bad as she pretended, either.
Her only other complaint - and boy did she complain! - was the need to wake up at night to pee. Other people may be trapped in iron lungs or crippled by degenerative diseases, but she wanted the world to be reminded several times a day that waking up to pee was a MUCH worse affliction than anything suffered by anyone else.
My mother got a really amazing amount of mileage out of her complaints about peeing at night. She consulted dozens of quacks. She was prescribed many different medications that were not supposed to be used simultaneously, from hormones to pills for incontinence. She finally found a doctor who recommended that she have a complete hysterectomy (at age 87). She really liked that idea - it would mean lots of attention!
It turns out my mother was secretly drinking a full can of Ensure every night before bed (a dietary aid for my father, not her). Naturally, the liquid had to go somewhere. The last thing she needed was a hysterectomy! All she needed to do was stop filling up on liquids at bedtime.
It figures that my mother was COMPLETELY unprepared to take care of a sick or injured child. Her attempts at playing nurse invariably made things worse instead of better.
When I was little, my brothers were horsing around and somehow I got thrown onto my bed. I landed directly on a sharp pencil. The pencil lead broke off in my botto and I had a bloody hole where it went in.
To me it seems like the obvious thing to do would be to get some tweezers and pull the thing out. It was black and visible. Instead, my mother put me in the bathtub. I have NO IDEA why she did this - she probably thought it would "soak out" the pencil - but the effect was terrible. The blood turned the water bright red and I was terrified, sitting in a bloodbath like The Death of Marat. The pencil lead (actually graphite, fortunately) stayed where it was until I finally had it removed in my thirties.
Once when I had a fever my mother drenched my pillow with perfume. This seems like the kind of idea one might pick up from a romantic Victorian novel in which the heroine dies of consumption. It was not a refreshing spritz of citrus in the air; my pillow was soaked with full-strength perfume right under my head. It was like a fever dream I could not escape.
I got tonsillitis routinely as a child. I remember many hours spent alone in bed, bored out of my mind, looking at the blue sky outside my bedroom windows, and listening to airplanes fly overhead. I was supposed to take huge penicillin pills, but my throat was practically swollen shut. So my mother would crush the pills between two spoons and add GRAPE JELLY. Just pause for a moment to think about a mouthful of grape jelly with bitter penicillin grit. There were many other possible solutions, starting with getting a liquid preparation of penicillin at the pharmacy and moving on down to the application of something more appetizing - say, chocolate pudding. But with her usual lack of interest, my mother never pursued any better alternatives. The only other option was plain water. It was torture!
The doctor recommended that I have my tonsils removed. My mother automatically dismissed this idea. Clearly the quack just wanted to make money. Eventually, when I was 22, I made my own arrangements to have a tonsillectomy, and it was the best thing I ever did.
When I was 18, I developed an odd rash on my arm. It got worse, and my mother finally took me to a quack. He prescribed two medications, which I took religiously. But the rash got worse.
Finally it got so bad my mother was forced to take me to a skin doctor. I was getting smarter by then, so I brought the bottles of pills with me.
The skin doctor read the labels on the prescriptions and immediately threw both of them in the trash. She was disgusted. It turns out the first was a medication for ringworm, which I did not have. The second was an appetite suppressant, because my mother thought I was too fat, and figured secretly putting me on speed was a good idea.
I had a fairly common teenage skin problem called pityriasis rosea. It was awful! It started out as small bumps like ostrich leather all over my front and back. Eventually every single little bump became large and red and painful. Nobody knows what causes this affliction. It takes about three months to run its course, and all you can do is treat the symptoms.
If MY child had this, I would avoid letting their skin dry out (hot showers and soap make the condition worse). I'd administer an antihistamine for the itching, and use Tylenol and cold compresses for the burning. Moisturizer, calamine lotion, cortisone cream, and oatmeal are all soothing. Of course, I had none of those things. I don't know what the doctor told my mother, but it made no difference because she would not have listened to the quack anyway.
One night the pain was so terrible I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was in tears in the dark and had no idea what to do. Even though I was a teenager, I went and woke up my parents.
My father was furious. He rolled over angrily and went back to sleep.
My mother went down to the kitchen and came back with a little poultice she had made. I remember being so relieved that someone was finally going to help me!
She dabbed the white mixture on my stomach, and within seconds it felt like my skin was in flames. The pain was EXCRUCIATING. She had mixed together baking soda - that is, SODIUM bicarbonate - and water. She was quite literally rubbing salt into my wounds. I have no idea why she thought that would be beneficial. I went from begging her for help to screaming at her to leave me alone. Did she WANT to hurt me? Maybe, on some unconscious level. Did she think to run a bath cool water and add some oatmeal? Of course not.
Now, I am well aware that most parents have not been to medical school, and that kids don't come with an owner's manual. When I had my first child, I had never held a baby before. I was as woefully ignorant as a new mother could be. The first time I changed her diaper, I put it on backwards, and I imagined the nurses shaking their heads when they took her back to weigh her.
But I did try to inform myself. I bought books. Big ones, like the Physicians' Desk Reference, the American Medical Association Family Medical Guide, the Merck Manual, Symptoms, and so on. Ironically, I am the one who inherited my grandparents' interest in medicine. The other bookshelves were filled with books about raising children, books about child development, books about communication, you name it.
Whenever one of my children got sick, I hit the books. After awhile they were onto me. "Not the books! Not the books!" they would cry, knowing I was stumped about something - and by God I was going to find the answer.
I looked for the best quacks available - and was very lucky to live outside New York, where there were some excellent ones. And we needed them.
Occasionally I went by the seat of my pants and just trusted my "mother's intuition." On one occasion my son developed big red spots. I took him to three different doctors and rejected ALL their ideas. I was terrified to disobey these brilliant, highly-educated professionals, but I just knew my son did not have scabies, or need an "antibiotic cocktail," or need half the blood in his body tested.
The spirit of my grandmother must have been with me. I treated his spots one by one - and there were a lot! - with ordinary Bactroban and cortisone cream, and they subsided. As he grew older, it became clear that he was allergic to nearly everything. We made friends with spots. They told us when there was a problem.
Maybe I was lucky to have such an incompetent mother. When I became a parent, I just did the opposite of what she did. It did not release me from her shadow - but it made me a better mother.
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