DAY 1 My dad, mom and I drove from Towanda to the Cresson Sanatorium
on a cold and rather dreary day on April 14, 1955. I wore a surgical mask during that 5 hour trip to protect my parents from
any germs if I coughed. I never really had a cough, one of the classic symptoms of TB. But I remember being glad for the mask
because it gave me an excuse not to talk. There really wasn't much to talk about. I'm sure my parents thought they
were taking me on a one way trip from which I would never return. My most vivid memory of the trip was passing through the
town of Tyrone, Pa where a paper mill was located. The pungent odor of the chemicals used in the paper making process at that
time was so strong that it made your eyes water, much like cutting into an onion.
Below is an aerial photo of the
san grounds taken in 1960 with the buildings labeled. The complex looked very much the same when I was admitted in 1955.
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DAY 1 We arrived at the sanatorium (san) after lunch.
I was checked in at the Administration Building and taken to the men's west wing ward. I was assigned a small cubicle
in a locker room which also housed showers and toilets. The cubicle was about the size of a typical dressing
room in a department store. The door quit about 18" above the floor so your feet could be seen if you were sitting
or standing within (I presume so that someone would see you if you died in your cubicle and could then drag you out!).
It had a bench seat along the back wall with a top that lifted up for storage below. There was a small cabinet
on the back wall and hooks on the wall to hang up clothes. Imagine trying to fit all your personal
possessions into your local Wal-Mart dressing room. It doesn't sound like much, but it was more than adequate for
the meager items I would need for my stay.
I changed into underwear, socks, pajamas, slippers and bathrobe. This
was to be my standard uniform for the next 12 months. I gave my "street" clothes to a nurse who informed us
they would have to be fumigated before giving them back to my mom to take home. The three of us were than
led into the ward where I was assigned a space. The ward layout is shown in the photo below
taken in the Women's East Wing ward. The Men's West Wing ward layout was identical.. There were 8 men along each wall with a wide center aisle. Each man had a bed, night table and wooden chair.
There was a short partition every two patients to give some sense of privacy. The windows extended almost up to
the ceiling with the upper section capable of being opened to let in lots of fresh air. I was assigned a corner bed
on the ground floor right across from the surgery building. After settling in, I said my good-byes to my parents and
they left for home, promising me they would visit me the next weekend (which they did).
At dinner time the hot food cart came through the ward. All the meals were delivered
on trays to your night stand and eaten bedside. As a 17 year old I was still a growing boy and had a
pretty healthy appetite and I suspected dinner might be the high point of that first day. But the main course that evening
was scrapple, a Pennsylvania creation, which I hated. I knew it was made out of pork lips, snouts and cheeks all ground
up into some grayish paste, molded into a rectangular block and sliced into thick slabs. If you omitted the "s" from
the name, the remainder pretty much described my evaluation of scrapple. So even dinner turned out to be a dud and I
thought the whole day was a downer. I didn't know it then, but things would only get better. They never
served scrapple again in the 16 months I was there.
THE FIRST MONTH
The first week was spent getting used to the san daily routine and meeting the other
15 men in my ward. And I do mean men! The average age was somewhere in the mid-40's, with a few in their 60's.
I had just turned seventeen two months earlier and was told I was the youngest male patient currently at the san,
a dubious honor at best. Most of the men were married with children and came from
all walks of life. As I met each one, we exchanged personal information (as men see these things) like hometown,
name of wife and kids and what they had done for a living before the san. The last bit of info they revealed, and the
most disconcerting, was the length of time they had been at the san. It soon became painfully obvious that some of the
guys had been there a long time. The winner (and I say this because he seemed to take some pride in the fact) was
a fellow named Jim who was in his 60's and thin to the point of being gaunt. He had been admitted to the ward
in 1941 and had been there ever since. I clearly remember thinking that this man had been in the san since I was
three years old! It seemed like a life sentence, and of course it was because he was never going to walk out of that
place. The rest of his life would be lived right there in the ward until they carried him out feet first. It didn't
seem possible that anyone could survive that long with TB. What I was really thinking was why would anyone want to continue
living under those circumstances? Death almost seemed preferable to me. But of course, that was the extent of
my wisdom at seventeen, not much appreciation for the long view. I see things a little differently now that I'm
older.
But one thing they had in common was their expertise on all things concerning TB. In fact,
you could get better information from them than you could from the doctors who made rounds. The problem was that the
cure for TB wasn't a matter of days or weeks, but months and years. Ask the doctor how you were doing compared
to last month would get a response such as "There's been some slight improvement". Great! But what did that mean?
On one hand the doctors didn't want to hold out any false hopes that you really were improving. On the other hand, even
if you were improving, they were hesitant to tell you because you might start overdoing it physically and relapse. So
they were walking a tightrope and tended to be non-committal. But any idea I might have had that this
was going to be a short visit was quickly dispelled by my fellow patient's diagnosis. It was their collective opinion
that anyone admitted to the san would spend a minimum of 12 months in the ward no matter how well or quickly they responded
to treatment. Of course, their diagnosis proved accurate as I spent very close to 12 months in the ward, give or
take a few weekd. There's nothing like actual life experience to know what you're talking about, and these guys had
it.
The basic daily routine was pretty simple. Breakfast, lunch and dinner broke up the day
into three segments. I soon learned that there was no reason to eat fast as you weren't going anywhere afterward.
The more time you killed, the better. We had pills (PAS and Isoniazid) to take every day and got shots of streptomyacin
twice a week (See Nowicki's writeup on that procedure.) The shots made my face tingle for about a day afterward and
I found myself constantly rubbing my face to ease the unpleasant feeling. Everything else was supposed to be bed rest.
We were told "Don't stand up if you can sit down. Don't sit down if you can lie down. Don't lie down and stay
awake if you can lie down and sleep." I thought the last logical step was "Don't lie down and sleep if you can
lie down and just stop breathing and die" which would after all provide permanent rest for your lungs. Actually,
even thought I might make fun of these seemingly simplistic rules, I had no trouble following them. I had the classic
TB symptoms of fatigue and low grade fever when I entered the san. The streptomycin quickly cured the fever,
but it took a good month to get over the fatigue. Eating, going to the bathroom and then flopping back into bed
to rest or take a nap was my basic routine for that first month. I never did have the more advanced symptoms of
a bad cough and spitting up blood, so with the fatigue and fever gone I soon felt almost "normal".
Another part of the cure was lots of fresh air, all year round. In the early days of TB
treatment before drugs were developed, rest and fresh air were pretty much the entire cure, unless your case was advanced
enough to require surgery. Even in March on top of a 2520 foot mountain in Pennsylvania with snow on the ground the
windows were opened every night to let in the frigid air. The only recourse from freezing to death was to pile on several
layers of heavy blankets pulled up under your chin. Only our heads stuck out in the cold air. Actually, the weird
thing is that to this day I still like to sleep with the window open year round with a heavy weight of blankets tucked up
under my chin with only my head exposed. Old habits die hard. Now if I could just get someone to bring my
breakfast tray in the morning and set it on the nightstand, I could be enjoying all the comforts of the san.
The above photo is included to show our beds which were made of iron
and virtually indestructible. My guess is that they had been there ever since the san opened in 1912 and just repainted
every few years with a white enamel finish. They had large
wheels which made them easy to roll away from the walls when they changed the sheets once a week But the
wheels had a more important function. If a patient started hemoraging the staff didn't take the time
to transfer him onto a gurney to get him to the emergency treatment room. Every second counts when you're choking on
your own blood. They simply rolled the bed with the patient in it down the center aisle and out the ward. Looking
back, it seems they could do this drill with the efficiency and speed of an Indy 500 pit crew. But then, at the
san, they got lots of practice.
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