Peritonitis

When I was ten in 1910 there was still a Chinatown in Camptonville. The one to the north of Main Street was still in existence. Grandfather and I were very friendly with the Celestial inhabitants, and in the month of February of that year they were celebrating China New Year's, and we were invited to partake with them of a feast for the festive occasion.

Amid the aroma of burning punks and other decorations characteristic of the season we sat down to a meal with everything one could think of to eat that was obtainable. And on the menu was some sort of a fish preparation. I, with my same characteristic eating ability, had to eat everything in sight. In process thereoff, I swallowed a fish bone. I remember feeling it go down my epiglotis.

About three days after that, at school, I took violently ill and had to go home. I continued to get worse and was sick as a horse for several days. There was no doctor here at that time; Dr. Lord had moved to Fair Oaks and opened up shop. My folks phoned to him, and he came back and treated me. I had apparently passed the worst of it and was recovering. They hired a trained nurse for me, and when Dr. Loard returned to Fair Oaks, he specifically told that nurse by no means to let me sit up, get up, or otherwise be disturbed for a certain length of time.

In a couple of days I improved to such an extent that the nurse took the matter into her hands and propped me up in bed. It appears that where the fish bone had punctured my large intestine, nature had walled the injured area off and was healing over it. When she sat me up, she broke the structure and from then on I immediately became worse and for days was in critical condition. From this I had gone into peritonitis and was filling up with pus.

Dr. Lord returned. Something had to be done so they decided that I would have to be operated on. Dr. Hydrich from North San Juan, W.P. Sawyer from Nevada City, and Dr. J.H. Barr from Marysville were all present. Dr. Carl Jones from Grass Valley had looked at me a day before on his way to Alleghany to treat a girl my same age who had a similar sickness.

They made an operating room out of my grandmother's living room, or parlor as it was then called, and cut me open. All they could do in this setting was to let the pus out and put in tubes to drain.

I was a sad citizen, a hole cut in my belly in two places with a tube between them, suffering like hell, thin as a skeleton, with very little chance for recovery. However, I was determined to live, and the doctors said that it was only my determination that caused me to live, so I struggled on.

I became so thin and in such pain with my legs doubled up that I broke the skin across the top and front of both knees, causing some ten to twenty scars on each knee, which I have and will carry all my life. They tried to build me up and fed me on melted butter, etc., soaked me in cod liver oil, etc, and I progressed that way for several weeks. I was so bad off that they ceased ringing the school bell and caused all disturbing noises to cease.

During this period O.N. Polly, a brother Mason in Brandy City, died and was to be buried here. The place where they dug his grave was so hard that they had to blast, and naturally I could hear it, so they told me that it was blasting on the county road.

By the middle of March, it appeared that I should be moved from Camptonville in order that I might mend quicker and better. Automobiles were a scarcity, and the roads were hardly fit for a mud wagon. However, the Kelly brothers, who were then the main undertaking and livery stable people in the county seat, had a limousine which they could send up. There was a huge mud hole in the road between town and Jaynes place so they got a lot of planks and planked over the muddy place, loaded me in the car as best they could and started on the way to Marysville. In due time I reached the county seat and was cared for in my great-uncle Jason R. Meek's home in the old Casey Block on D Street where the Lipp & Sullivan establishment now stands.

In due time I recovered so that I could get around a little, very weak and puny and still in the classification of a skeleton. All through that summer I sat around my grandmother's place with my side open and having to be dressed twice a day, and most everything I ate came out my side in the bandages. The wound had become calloused and would never heal so I was taken in the month of November to Sacramento to White's Hospital where a second operation was performed by Dr. John White, a renowned surgeon at that time.

He cut out part of my large intestine, threw it away, brought the ends together, and sewed them up, put me back together and from then on I recovered steadily and became somewhat of a normal individual from then on, excepting that I have had a weak side which I have had to favor all my life, being careful not to lift or strain myself as some unusual activity might break the whole thing loose and I would be a mess again.

All of this caused me to lose about two years of school and prevented me from participating in normal activity such as athletics, swimming, rigid hoseback riding, etc. I could not live or do like the normal kid of my time did. However, I took it all right and forgot the things I could not do and thanked the Lord I was able to survive and live and enjoy the things that I could do.