Memories of Scarlet Fever
I’m not talking about the other Scarlett here, who was “Gone with the wind” even though I was gone in some sense. No, this is about another kind of Scarlet Fever that striked me in the autumn 1968 when I was 9 years old.
At first it looked like an ordinary cold, but as soon as the red rash came on my chest we knew instantly that I’ve got it from a girl I had played with. Some parents weren’t so orderly, so they let out their sick children to play, which started an epidemic of Scarlet fever.
Some strains of group A streptococci cause severe infection and may lead to shock, multisystem organ failure, and death. Scarlet fever is one of those. Early recognition and treatment with antibiotics are critical. Before the antibiotics it had a mortality of 30%.
The effects of the disease were considerable, a throat infection could spread and become a bad abscess, ear inflammation or meningitis without treatment. Afterwards you could get rheumatic fever, kidney inflammation and heart muscle inflammation.
When I got it in 1968, it was not as feared as it was earlier, beacause they had begin to treat it with antibiotics. I was just in the last group that were sent to hospital to deal with it (unluck for me!), after that you were allowed to stay at home to cure it. Very often you have to treat the whole family anyway.
There were no children pedagogy used there. They were quite terrifying in their manner. My Mom didn’t want to leave me there, but had no choice. There were many children crowded there since it were an epidemic hospital and we were all kind of left on our own, which created a little bit too wild environment for my taste.
I was there for a long time, no one remember exactly how long. A couple of months probably. My family came to visit me, except from my brother. He was under age 15 and wasn’t allowed to come. Very strange restrictions indeed.
When you had a visit and they brought you candy, you didn’t get the candy from them, you got it afterwards. That was probably one thing they did right, because they took a bit of the candy from us that did get visitors and gave it to the kids that didn’t. At least we hoped that it was the case, since it disappeared a lot of candy before we got it!
The only treatment I got were antibiotics. I also remember that they did take blood samples from me very often. I got so used to it that I still prefer when they take it from my arm and not from the fingers.
I didn’t seem to get well there. I’m not surprised. I didn’t like the crodwy and loud environment, the way they speaked (not!) to me and above all: I didn’t like the food and especially the dinner time. No nurses had time to spend with us, we should eat on our own, the food was not warm enough and it was very often fish or something else I didn’t like.
I was used to my Moms excellent cooking and getting warm meals and loving care too. Besides that, we all know that sick children don’t have the best appetite and could need some coaxing…
The most important thing: no one controlled if we really did eat or not. Which I hardly didn’t, but what did they do? They gave me vitamin pills! Did they help? Not much. Which made me way to skinny. I remember my weight: 24 kg (52 pound) and I was rather tall already at that age.
My siblings were teasing me when I finally came back home again, they called me names like “The Biafra child” (starving population in Nigeria) because I was so skinny. Like a skeleton they thought.
What a difference from the childrens hospital of today! Like night and day difference!
That hospital care have been with me for many years after that, because I was there just before the time I started to grow tall so fast and my body never got the chance to build up some fat, so it wasn’t until I was over 30 that I got more normal skinny.
I do have problems right now to maintan and gain weight and that’s no picnic I tell you. It may sounds heavenly in dieting peoples ears, but it really is hard work just as it is to keep a diet - just the opposite! You get so tired of it.
I didn’t know that Scarlet fever can be spread to animals, but I just read in one of our newspapers, that the Gorilla baby Enzo in Kolmårdens Zoo has been fighting a virusinfektion and Scarlet fever for a month now.
Other from that, I haven’t heard anything about Scarlet fever for many years now.
I have no idea how common it is nowadays. Do you?
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