Diseases of a Soviet child
My son! in your illness, do not be negligent, but pray to the Lord, and He will heal you.
Sirach 38: 9
Sirach 38: 9
This night light "with a cockerel", bought in Leningrad in 1961. They lit it whenever I got sick and I had insomnia. So then I always tried to shove it somewhere far away so that it would not remind me of these sad circumstances ... But it has survived to this day, however
History Soviet everyday life. This topic was suggested to me by one of the VO readers. And yes - indeed, the topic is very interesting. But at the same time time consuming and very, very extensive. Requiring significant volumes of photo-illustrative material. And it's not so easy to assemble. Therefore, to begin with, we will do much easier, namely this: I will just talk about what concerns me myself, and everyone who reads this will be able, in turn, to supplement the story with his own impressions. This will be our own story, from our distant Soviet childhood and its everyday life!
Now, when all of us, as never before, are concerned about the problem of our health, there is every reason to remember how children in the USSR were ill before. It is clear that the study of health problems in the Soviet Union draws on more than one doctoral dissertation and would require many years of research. But as mentioned above, all the material in this case is just my continuous memories. And now, remembering the past, I can say that I started to get sick ... very early. Even when our family lived in a wooden house, where there were only two living rooms: a large hall in which my grandmother slept on the sofa, and a small bedroom where my mother's bed was located, my crib, an old oval mahogany table on which stood a kerosene a lamp with a bulb in the style of Bernard Palissy and a glass container with a disgusting-looking kombucha, the tincture of which I needed to drink daily. Also in this room there was a large and also old wardrobe and ... that's it. Well, my grandfather even slept in a cubbyhole near the door in the vestibule, even though he was in charge of the city council during the war years and was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Badge of Honor. However, then on our street so many lived. And some still live like that.
And it was in this room that I fell ill for the first time when I was about five years old, no more, that is, somewhere in 1959. I got sick with a viral flu and everyone around me walked and repeated: "He has a viral flu!" So I remember it. All my childhood illnesses began the same way - high fever and vomiting, so I really did not like to get sick. What good is it when every now and then turns you inside out. The sunlight hurt my eyes, so the window was curtained and I had to lie in a semi-dark room.
They treated me with norsulfazole tablets. I could not swallow them, and they pushed them to me and gave them on a teaspoon with a slice of apple. The taste is disgusting! Even with an apple! And then my grandmother and my mother switched to herring. With a piece of herring, I still agreed to chew this muck.
The flu gradually turned into pneumonia. A nurse began to come to my house to give injections of penicillin. And it was ... very painful. So my mother and grandmother had to hold me, and I screamed like a cut. Well, that's how I was then a boy - "a delicate flower on a thin stem."
Periodically, my left leg ached very badly. "At least endure the saints!" I could start to get sick in the middle of the game (and then I had to urgently run home!), I could have lunch ... But I didn't even stutter about it to my family. I don’t know how anyone, but at that time (both in my family and in the families I know) there was a strict rule for children: they should not cause trouble for adults. That is, they should have been seen, but not heard. And God forbid to make adults bother about you. Fever sickness is a good case. And the same green snot, stretching from nose to lip, in our street and did not pay attention: "And so it will pass!" And then, after all, I was very afraid of injections and ... stoically endured pain, lying on the couch under a blanket - running, they say, and tired. And - thank God, no one paid attention to me.
Meanwhile, it was clearly neuralgia, a consequence of difficult childbirth, and just a few massage sessions were enough to fix everything. But ... who at that time gave the child a massage? It walks after all ... Now, if there was polio ... By the way, it was then that nurses from the polyclinic went to all the houses where the children were and gave them "peas" for this disease. So, fortunately, no one on the street got sick with this disease. But I saw children who had had it in Penza.
In 1961, my mother took me to Leningrad. We stopped at Obukhovskoy Oborony Avenue, at the apartment of our relative, General Konoplev, and ... after our "Penza hut" his three-room apartment with all the amenities made an amazing impression on me. The general himself lived in the summer at his dacha, so he invited us to his place. In the first three days we walked around the Hermitage, visited Petropavlovka, the house of Peter the Great, the Summer Palace, the Aurora, and then in the Summer Garden my mother treated me to breakfast of sandwiches with black caviar and ice cream with frozen strawberries. On the Nevsky in Petrovsky passage, I asked her to buy a night light in the form of a tower based on Pushkin's fairy tale about the golden cockerel. There was another one in the form of a Japanese pagoda, painted with golden bamboo shoots against a background of blue sky, white clouds and dragons, but my mother said: “Choose!”, And I, after thinking, chose “cockerel”. I didn't think then that I would need it that very night.
Because on the same night I started having “follicular sore throat”, and ... I had to do injections again and drink grape juice to support my heart. Mom alone could not cope with me and called my grandmother by telegram. So the two of them began to look after me. Due to the constant high temperature, I did not sleep at night, and this is where living in the general's house came in very handy. He had the entire Adventure Library of that time - books with a gold spine and embossed on the cover, and my mother began to read them to me. And she began with "The Mines of King Solomon." I remember that I almost died of fear, hearing about the witch Gagula, and how she left Allan Quartermain and his friends to die in the treasury behind the White Death, but still did not die. And then I recovered, and they began to take me for walks, and sometimes quite far from home. They did not bother me with strict morality, they scolded me for pranks and took me for a walk to the Summer Garden ...
After the sore throat, I was thin as a skeleton, and the neighbors, naturally, very kindly asked my grandmother: "Don't you feed him at all?"
And then I have to go to school, and in 1962 my mother took me to get healthier in the Crimea by the sea. In all respects, it was a remarkable trip. But the main thing is that in the fall I finally (from the age of eight) went to school and for some time I really did not get sick. And then, then sore throat again covered me. In the third grade I studied like this: a day at school, two (with a temperature) at home. Doctor Gorshkov, the luminary of the local throat surgery, said: "We need to remove the tonsils," and ... they tied me with a rope, like a mummy, and removed both the tonsils and the adenoids at the same time. So he cut me 35 minutes, although my mother (she also had them removed at one time) and promised me 15 oaths. Oh, how I got offended at her when I left the operating room.
However, after that I really did not get sore throat. However, the "light" touched my vocal cords, and since then I have two voices left in memory of my childhood - an ordinary male and a thin one. You can easily switch from one to the other. So a pranker, I think, I could make a great one too.
School means regular medical examinations, vaccinations. At this point I endured the injections, did not cry, and even laughed at those who cried. But what about - "push the falling!" But already in the first grade, at the examination at the dentist, it turned out that I had the wrong structure of the jaw and the bite. The lower teeth go beyond the upper ones, but vice versa. They sent me for a consultation to the city dental clinic, put on a plastic "mouth guard", and I had to eat, drink and talk with her. Inconveniently scary. But after two weeks she flew off.
In the second grade, everything was the same. Examination, diagnosis, referral and ... a new, only now metal prosthesis for the lower teeth. True, I, like Tom Sawyer with his cut finger (and a pulled out tooth!), Was lucky in this case. Now all the boys, both at school and on the street, asked me to show their "golden teeth". My jaw was straightened, but they warned me not to box. And, of course, even then I had to get acquainted with a Soviet drill with a pedal drive. The dentist shook him with his leg and at the same time drilled your tooth, and without anesthesia, anesthesia (novocaine) was done only when removed. To say that I didn't like it is to say nothing. And the word "bitches" was the most ... pronounced of all those that I then awarded my doctors. The women "zubikhi" (as we, the boys called the dentists then) were offended and reprimanded their grandmother: "The boy is from a decent family, but he swears like that ..." But what if I was in great pain?
I must say that we, the inhabitants of Proletarskaya Street, were very lucky that a former zemstvo doctor, Doctor Milushev, lived there. As soon as one of our children fell ill, mothers and grandmothers ran not to the clinic, but to him, and if only they found him at home, then he never refused anyone. He came with an old-fashioned bag, and always ... healed our children very well.
However, you will read about how exactly this happened next time. It has been proven that articles that are too large are usually poorly read!
To be continued ...
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