Cresson TB Sanatorium Remembered
Chuck 6

War Analogy

People always ask how it felt to have to leave my family, school and friends so suddenly and be quarantined in a hospital for 16 months.  The closest analogy I can think of is to be drafted into the military.  One day I was living with my family and friends and three weeks later I was living in a hospital ward with my fellow patients, all complete strangers to me.  We weren't being shot at, but we were all fighting a common enemy, TB, that could kill us.  And just as in war, some of us would survive and some would not. 

Death was just a fact of life at the san.  Some patients, like me, were on the road to recovery.  But many others were in various stages of dying, even though it could happen suddenly or take years.  There were three different ways that I saw patients die at the sanatorium, with the first being hemorrhaging. Because tuberculosis eats away at your lungs, hemorrhaging could be very likely to happen in advanced cases. If the TB ate through a blood vessel in your lung, the blood would collect in the lung and it would be like drowning in your own blood.  Sometimes the hemorrhaging could be stopped, but that seemed to be the exception.  And you never knew who it would happen to or when.

The worst was when it happened at night.  Bedtime was 9 p.m. sharp, at which time the san radio station went off the air, the lights turned out in the wards and you would go to sleep.  But this one particular night, as if awakening to a nightmare, the lights came on in the middle of the night and there were nurses and orderlies running into the ward.  After my eyes adjusted to the glare of the lights, I looked down the ward and saw one of the patients sitting up in bed, coughing and choking and spewing blood all over the white linens on his bed.  The nurses and orderlies grabbed his bed and wheel it right out of the ward and down to the emergence treatment room.  The whole episode only took about thirty seconds.

My adrenalin was pumping, but I finally manage to get back to sleep.  Then, in the morning, I awoke to find the bed, which had been rolled out the evening before, empty and made up with clean linens, ready for a new patient to occupy it.

The second way that people would succumb to the illness would be from surgery. Surgery to remove diseased lung tissue was a common practice and some patients were in too bad a condition, either from the TB alone or in combination with other physical illnesses, to survive the operation.  

But the worst form of death was for those who not only had tuberculosis, but had it in combination with silicosis, or "black lung", from working in the Pennsylvania coal mines. The coal dust they breathed for years permeated their lungs making it more difficult for the blood vessels to absorb oxygen.  I saw guys struggle for months, gasping for every single breath they took.  It was like slow strangulation, they couldn’t get enough air to survive. 

At age 17 it was a very strange feeling to be surrounded by death and to see people die.  Especially since I had no fear that I was in danger of dying, which gave me the feeling of just being a spectator on the sidelines, watching the carnage around me. 

But the military analogy ended in a profound way when a TB patient was discharged (same term as used for leaving limitary service) and entered back into society.  A big part of coping with any traumatic event is talking about it with others who have undergone a similar experience, which is a kind of do-it-yourself therapy.  In 1955, the average age for the men patients was 52.  And on any given day it was easy to find a small group of men in the ward retelling stories from their military service in WW2 or the Korean War.  I still remember one of the guys who was in his late twenties and had served in the Korean War.  He remembered the bitter cold of the winter and the frostbite that incapacitated so many of the troops.   But his greatest fear was falling asleep at night in his foxhole because the enemy was constantly slipping into the camp under cover of darkness and killing sleeping G.I.s.  He still had trouble getting a good night's sleep, even in the protected environment of the san ward.
 
In civilian life, veterans had no problem finding other veterans with whom to swap war stories.  However, the discharged TB patient didn't have that kind of support group, for several reasons.  First, TB suffers were relatively few in number and spread out geographically.  For instance, my home town of Towanda had a population of about 3000 people and to my knowledge there was only one other person living there who had been in a TB sanatorium.  So there was no such thing as a local TB support group. 
 
Secondly, even in 1955, there was a stigma attached to TB, so much so that many TB survivors wouldn't talk about it.  This stigma goes back many years to the time when TB was a major killer in this country.  (TB is still a major killer worldwide in under-developed countries and carries the same stigma today.)  TB was not a stigma for me personally because I was too young to have been indoctrinated by that attitude.  Actually, my concept of a TB sufferer came from the movies I watched in the 1940s and 50s, like "Camille" and "A Song To Remember", the life of Chopin.  These featured TB sufferers as the stars of the story, portrayed as tragic heroes and heroines who were to be admired as they coughed their life away and delicately left a trace of blood on a white handkerchief. 
 
It wasn't until Feb 2009 when I launched this website that I began making contact with other TB survivors so that we could swap our san stories.  The initial interest in the website surprised me at first, but then I realized that many people, me included, have been waiting, in some cases, for 60 years to tell our stories.