It is interesting to look back an realize how some events change and shape our lives. For some it may be one huge moment or event. For me it was a quite subtle series of things.
Arriving home from the hospital with a new baby I not only had a husband and a four year old but also Dennis's Mother and Father. Dennis had taken some time off from work not to entertain his parents or help with four year old Wes but because he had stuff to do in the garage. Dr. Herndon always saw his patients each week for four weeks after the delivery of a baby and it was not a great visit the week after Wally was born. Seems like my blood pressure was really high when I went in for the first checkup. He instructed me to go home and tell Dennis's parents to go home when I explained the scenario at home. He wanted me back in his office in four days and if the blood pressure was not down I would be back in the hospital. That certainly did not go over well with Dennis but they did disappear the same afternoon. Blood pressure was back to normal on Friday.
Wally was a newborn that people dream about having. He slept through the night very early and just a sweet little guy. At about five weeks of age he suddenly began having what is called projectile vomiting. Hours after he ate he would throw up formula that seemed like it just came from the bottle instead of being sour smelling and it came up with such force that it flew across the room. That was a little scary so off the see our pediatrician.
Dr. Pharo was a very soft spoken and very conscientious as I had learned with Wes. He explained to me that it sounded like pyloric stenosis which causes the muscle at the bottom of the stomach to slowly close prohibiting the digestion of food. Since it was a Friday he sent us home with instructions to give Wally Benadryl over the weekend to see if it helped. When Dr. Pharo called on Sunday night I told him Wally was actually a little worse. So he told me to take Wally to Children's hospital on Monday morning. By a stroke of luck we got the best pediatric surgeon in the state of Texas. Wally and I spent the night at the hospital, surgery the next morning, first feeding at 11:00 AM and sent home at 2:00 in the afternoon when the formula stayed down. No more problems so it was pretty simple.
Dennis decided that the dragster would not run well because the chassis was no good. Good old me did not argue even though there were a lot of very good running cars with the same chassis. He sold the chassis and immediately ordered a new one from a local chassis builder and friend, Paul Peyton. That made for a relatively quiet winter except
that he found an English Bulldog puppy born on the same day as Wally so it became the Christmas puppy and dog number dog six. He also did replace the flathead engine in the 1950 Mercury with a Ford V-eight.
This was 1975 and the days of the dare devil motorcycle guy named Evel Knieval. Wes had an Evel Knieval toy, we had actually gone to see him jump over many semi-trucks at Green Valley Raceway and all the kids in the neighborhood were crazy about him. I have to admit that I thought he was really pretty cool in that bad boy sort of persona. The neighbor kids built a jump ramp on the sidewalk and one weekend while working in the garage I watched the kids, including four and a half year old Wes going up the ramp and flying through the air. Sure looked like fun. Looked like lots more fun than building somebodies's race car body.
Have you guessed yet what my next move was? I borrowed one of the kid's bikes and decided to fly through the air myself. It looked pretty easy and if Wes could do it I certainly could. Well, I guess I did not fully get the idea that you should keep pedaling and keep the speed up as you were going up the ramp. At the top of the ramp the front wheel dropped off the end due to lack of speed and I did fly through the air without the bike with the greatest of ease. I splatted on the sidewalk on my face. All I can remember after landing was my neighbor calling the ambulance and Dennis asking me where my insurance card was. The ambulance ride is a total blur.
One look at me in the emergency room and they called a plastic surgeon as no other doctor wanted to touch the mess I had made of my face. I did get up off the gurney a couple of hours into the wait for the plastic surgeon to go to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and thought "Boy, you have really done it this time" as my whole face was skinned up and my upper lip was split from the center of my lip to the left corner of my nose. Not a pretty sight.
The plastic surgeon arrived after about a three hour wait. He looked at me and asked how in the hell did I do that. When I told him I tried to do an Evel Knieval stunt he rolled in laughter and asked me how old I was. Proudly I told him I was a twenty-eight year old mother of two. He then told me I should have paid more attention to how many times Evel had crash landed so I came back at him with how sexy I thought Evel was. We got off to a good start and I think he delighted in sticking the needles in to deaden the lip for a multitude of stitches. Evidently I had run one of my upper front teeth through my bottom lip and just to prove to me how stupid I was he did not deaden it when he stitched the inside of my bottom lip up. That Hurt! The really hard part before the lip healed up was laughing. I guess I was the only person who thought the stunt was funny and I would have to hold my lip together to laugh with no pain.
Mom and Dad had been after me to go back to school. Dad and I spent many hours when I was growing up talking about doctors and medicine. He really always wanted me to go to medical school. My SAT scores showed I should avoid math and science at all costs and study something a little less intellectual. I had managed to garner eighty-seven hours in college without those two subjects before I quit the third time. Due to their wanting me to finish and a couple of doctors that really inspired me I decided to go back to college.
It was a little daunting to find out to graduate with a pre-med degree that I only needed fifty-two hours of math and science. I chose to go and was accepted at Texas Women's University in Denton rather than North Texas University as I felt I would do better not competing against guys in math and science. All my female friends thought I was crazy, my parents were overjoyed and Dennis was laughing figuring I would flunk out the first semester. I also kept selling ceramic items to Margaret's Bed and Bath shop on Greenville Avenue in Dallas to pay for my tuition even though Dennis moaned for three years that he never thought he would have to put his wife through college. Everyone in Dallas County must have had a little ceramic bathtub soap dish.
Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon, and Dr. Herndon both were inspiration and both became my cheerleaders for the next three years. Dr. Chandler did boob jobs for several of my friends, My Mom came down and had her eyes done later a facelift so he and I stayed in contact even though I did not do any more Evel Knieval stunts. He was interesting from the fact that he got a lot of his training serving on a medical ship during the Vietnam War taking care of injured soldiers. He also had Insurance Only written across my chart in big red letters. Of course I had insurance but his policy was if insurance did not cover an accident that needed plastic surgery then he would never send out a bill. He always said he made enough money from insurance and cosmetic surgeries to do just fine. He also looked over my past college transcripts and told me if I was really intending to try for medical school I needed a 4.0 average in the rest of my classes. Nothing like a little pressure before you even get started.
Luckily I had used a babysitting service on some weekends when we traveled with the race car. They were older ladies that came to your house and stayed for a couple of hours or for an entire weekend. The great thing was that they charged a dollar an hour and the house was always cleaner than when I left it and the boys were happy. Wally could not go to the TWU Child Care Center until he was potty trained and Wes would be in kindergarten the following September. Knowing that the first class I had to take was Algebra I enrolled only in it for the summer school session in June of 1975.
Needless to say after I enrolled I became terrified. I was ten years older than anyone else in the class, hadn't studied anything except a cookbook or car parts for six or seven years and the instructor was none other than the Dean of the Math Department. Just what was I thinking!
No comments:
Post a Comment