by Robert LaFrance
Anybody who has a low embarrassment threshold shouldn’t choose a registered nurse for a mother, at least they shouldn’t have back in the days when I was growing up, in the 1950s. My mother, who trained in Norwood, Massachusetts, and came back to New Brunswick for love—or so I’m told—was more or less the unpaid doctor on call in Tilley, NB, and it resulted in some interesting scenes around our house. For example, she (I emphasize ‘she’) wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to conduct our Saturday evening bath in the kitchen in front of company.
More than once she treated broken bones, and everything from measles to Dengue Fever, sciatica, gunshot wounds and bad burns. Of course she sent them to the doctor if the case was serious enough, but most often she was the ER of North Tilley, NB. Any kid with a fever would find himself being bathed by my mother who wielded the cold washcloth like a sword.
So far I have mentioned mother taking care of the illnesses and injuries of others, but it is now time to mention us kids—and all we endured. I refer to enemas. I swear, she would have given us an enema for a broken leg. It was her cure for everything when it involved her kids, while she used traditional medical practices for everybody else.
“Feeling a little sniffly, are you Bobby? You look as if you need an enema.”
“Lawrence, you didn’t seem very hungry at supper, and it was your favourite too—chicken gizzard soufflé—I’ll go find the enema tube.”
“Joan, you…” Well, you get the point. I am not even going to explain what an enema is, but let’s just say it was an early colonoscopy without the camera. Believe me, after one of those, no vile bodies would dare try and exist in the bowels of the victim. And keep in mind, this was in the outhouse days, if you get my drift. We didn’t have indoor running water and a flush toilet until 1967 when I was 19 and gone.
When I got into my early teens, I was in open rebellion against enemas. I think it all came to Armageddon the evening my cousin George arrived from Millinocket, Maine to stay with us a week or so while his father and mother were away in Gorham, southern Maine, where my grandfather and grandmother Schriver lived. George no sooner got into the house than mother started asking him how he was feeling. I tried desperately to catch his eye and warn him, but it was to no avail. “Well, I have had a kind of an ache for a few days,” he said, “but that was just because I dropped a stick of 4-foot rough pulp on my shoulder.”
Not the thing to say. “I think an enema would be just the thing to get you back in order,” mother said, and went into her bedroom to collect the tube, funnel, etc. George just looked bewildered, his mother being a seamstress and not an RN. He didn’t know about enemas. I grabbed him by the arm and said let’s get out of here before she kills you. We headed for the barn where I had been learning to smoke just beside the haymow, probably NOT one of the safer places to have lit matches and cigarettes. Over a couple of Camels (I refer to the cigarettes, not Syrian farm animals) we talked about ways to avoid enemas. Finally I stood up, after carefully throwing my lit cigarette into the haymow.
Back at the house, I bearded the dragon. “No more enemas! It’s the middle of the twentieth century now, Mum,” I said, “and I’m a teenager. That’s why God made Ex-Lax.”
“You’re only twelve years old; I’ll decide who gets an enema!” she roared, then sniffed. “I can smell smoke. Were you smoking in the barn again? Come on!” There was just a little smoke coming from the haymow. We always kept pails of rainwater on the barn floor for the cows to drink. Half a dozen pails of water and there was no more smoke. I don’t know what she was worried about.
The point is, we had made our stand, and won. She gave up. To sum up, the sight of blood doesn’t scare me, since I saw lots of other people’s over the years, and people moaning in pain – why I just laugh, but those gol-danged enemas! I develop a nervous twitch just thinking about them.
-end-
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