I don't, of course, remember much from before 1962 and the years from 1962 to 1965 are kind of a blur with little chronological context stuck in my memory. I remember hiding in these, what seemed to pre-teen me, monster shrubs along the front of our house in a large village of around 1200 people lying along a river plain. I remember watching the Wizard of Oz by myself on the television and being so scared by the Wicked Witch that I learned to tie my shoe laces for the first time. I remember learning to ride a bike that my Dad bought for me. I recall one day racing a car home on the bike and apparently forgetting how to use the breaks on it. I did stop but not thanks to the breaks. I was stopped by the brick steps that rose up to our front door patio. I remember crying afterwards because parts of my nose were detached from my face. I remember my Mum running out, picking me up, putting me on the kitchen table, and calling the doctor. The doctor came over and sewed my nose back on while I was still awake and crying. The scars are still noticeable if you look close enough. I remember the first day of school. We lived on the north side of the village so I and a friend (Mark Mattson) walked across the river and took a left. The school wasn't too far down the road that ran along the south side of the river. I recall walking to a railroad trestle that crossed a deep gorge and looking down, way down to the river below. It was amazing. I remember the Beatles, buying Beatles records, and going to see the movie A Hard Days Night with my sister at what seemed like a huge cinema to us little ones. I remember massive snow falls and building forts in the snow after the snow stopped. I recall running around in the woods sometimes alone, sometimes with others I recall my sister and me investigating what maleness and femaleness were like. And I remember the assassination of the then US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That was shocking.
Then everything changed in 1966 and 1967. We had moved to the big city in the meantime and I got involved in track. I was a good 75 metre runner but since two of my classmates were substantially taller than me, had longer legs than me, and were just as fast I never finished above third. I was, if I can be immodest for a moment, quite good at long distance running. One beautiful and sunny day I was doing a long distance run. I was leading, as I almost always did, but suddenly I could not breath. I had to stop and sit in the grass. My parents took me to see a doctor and I was diagnosed with hay fever.
In the next meantime we moved to an even bigger city. My breathing problems continued. Dad took me to the Methodist Hospital in Oak Cliff, a city that had been incorporated into Dallas. They diagnosed me as having asthma and put me on cortisone. Cortisone was great and it made me feel like I could do anything I wanted to do. On the down side, It also had side effects, in my case blown up cheeks. So I was taken off cortisone and put on a portable nebuliser instead.
My doctors soon wanted to investigate other theories as to why I had breathing problems. They did a skin test for allergies which, as a recall, was negative. They put me on an all soy died which wasn't very good at the time and again the results were negative for allergies. They supposedly fixed a problem with my esophagus. All the while I continued to use the nebuliser, something that largely kept me stuck inside when I was not at school since I had to take it three times a day, morning, after school, at night.
The nebuliser treatment wasn't very helpful. I recall that I had bouts of breathing troubles periodically. On one oocasion my breathing got so bad that Dad had to take me to Methodist Hospital where I was given what seemed like a massive dose of epinephrine in a very large syringe. I watched as the doctor put in into the pit of my arm. I recall vomiting from it when I got home, something that helped my breathing. I also recall having immense difficulty simply walking up the stairs of my junior high suffering as I went up and having to stop and to catch my breath at each landing on the way up.
In the 1970s my asthma treatment changed and changed again. I was put on kenalog but when the kenalog shot wore off I generally ended up in the hospital. Once the kenalog was no longer helpful I was put on albuterol, theophylline, and prednisone. I recall one day being taken to Parkland Hospital where I was given what to me was the most awful and painful thing I had ever experienced: a blood gas test by someone who really did not know how to do it. Man did it hurt. It was not until the 1990s with the introduction of advair and singulair into my asthma treatment regimen that I could actually live a somewhat normal life if with limits, limits learned over the course of forty years.
Thinking back on my illness I think that having asthma played a major role in making me who I am today. It made me introspective, introverted, distant, bookish, and a cinephile as I read and watched movies a lot because I could no longer do what my siblings and the neighbourhood kids did which was to head outside in the neighbourhood to play, play which involved a lot of running around and the playing of semi-organised games of football, the Texas religion.
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