3. Hospital

I was in the hospital for two months during first grade, October and November. I had rheumatic fever, but of course my parents didn’t know that as they were driving me to emergency room. They took me because I was complaining of the worst headache I’d ever had in my life. I think I must have been running a high fever as well, because my image of it seems steamy, peeling at the edges. Me, in the back seat, crying, twisting my body around because I thought there would be some position I could find that would stop the pain. My mother, in the back seat with me, with a wet cloth she kept trying to hold to my head but that I kept wriggling away from. My father, up front, staring ahead as he drove and, I think, crying himself. When we got to the hospital I remember not wanting to get out of the car, because in their rush to get me out of the house my parents hadn’t let me change out of my pajamas, and I felt embarrassed.

My parents used to say the doctors told them that if they hadn’t gotten me to the emergency room right then, if it had been just a half hour more, I might have had permanent brain damage or even died. But don’t people always say things like that, if you survive an emergency room visit?

I’m sure there were nurses who went out of their way to spend time with me. I was an outgoing six-year, and even if the illness had taken a lot of that energy out of me, I was still six years old and alone in the hospital. I’m sure my doctor, Dr. Van Zandt, a short, abrupt man who wore a cap with fishing lures attached to it in the office when he met with patients, must have realized how strange and intimidating it was to a six-year-old to be so sick and tried to make me laugh, gave me a tongue depressor or two to keep as souvenirs. I’m sure my father, when he visited on nights and weekends, must have brought books and toys, because buying things was his usual response to any stressful situation. I’m sure when I finally came home, my parents must have made me a treat dinner and let me do anything I wanted for a few weeks, so grateful were they to have me home and back to my usual self. And I’m sure I must have felt an enormous dread the first day in December I went back to school after missing so much, having to face Mrs. Miller who, in even the one month I’d spent with her, I’d come to know as a mean and demanding teacher.

I don’t remember any of this. What I do remember is the Dennis the Menace comic books in the children’s room. I wasn’t really reading yet, just a few words here and there, but I must have gotten someone to read them to me so many times that I could infer the words from the pictures. Probably my mother. She told me she visited every day, although again I have no memory of that either.

Maybe they made such an impression because I’d never seen comic books before. But I remember spending hours with them, not caring how many times I’d read them before, losing myself in whatever scheme Dennis was trying to pull this time, what Mr. Wilson was saying about how badly the Mitchells were raising their child. The simple explanations of complex things that Dennis gave Joey, which even at six I realized were the wrong explanations, the tree house where Dennis spent his time. I have no memory of doctors, nurses, blood tests, heart monitors, hospital food, plastic sheets, but these things are still clear to me. 

The idea to make the scrapbooks came from one of the comic books itself. The story had something to do with Dennis going to visit a sick friend in the hospital, and at the end there was a “Hey, kids” type of page where the Dennis the Menace writer, Hank Ketchum, suggested that a good way to help out sick kids was to cut Dennis the Menace comics out of the daily paper, glue them on pieces of paper, string the pages together into a book, and then donate the book to your local hospital. 

It probably wouldn’t have made much of an impression if I hadn’t known there was a huge pile of newspapers in one of the hospital storage rooms, waiting to get thrown away. I’d noticed it one day when they were wheeling me down there for one test or another. 

I asked a nurse if I could go down and look at them. Who was going to say no to a six year old with rheumatic fever? And sure enough, our local paper, the Times Herald, carried the big one-panel Dennis the Menaces every weekday. 

Construction paper, scissors, glue, string appeared: again, probably my mother. Every morning I went down to the storage room, collected up another 10 or 15 pages with comics on them and brought them up to the children’s room. There, I cut out the Dennis the Menace panels and pasted them onto the paper and punched holes and strung the pages together with twine. 

I got very good at it. I could cut on an exact line, and use just enough glue so the paper didn’t bubble up. I learned to tie a knot in the string, and learned the letters so I could write “Dennis the Menace” on the title page.

I’m sure the nurses loved the first book I made. I’m sure they patted my head and said how thoughtful it was to try to make some sick child happy and behind my back commented on how poignant it was for me to be making these books to make sick children happy when I was a sick child myself. I’m sure by the fifth or sixth book they were a less enthusiastic, and by the tenth were starting to consider the scrapbooks eyesores that were taking up valuable shelf space in the children’s room. I definitely made at least ten of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to twenty, because I know I worked on them every day.

Again, I have no memory of the reaction to the scrapbooks. I remember creating them. I remember leaving them in the children’s room. And I remember for years afterward, whenever we passed the hospital on the way to our always anxious visits to Van Zandt’s office for my checkups, I’d think of them, and wonder if they were still there, cheering up some other sick kid. I liked to believe they were.