Love and the Measles

I am a member of an online writing group.  We have fifteen minutes writing challenges.  This one was to be about love and the measles.  I rather liked it when it was finished (fifteen minutes to get it down, and a wee bit more time to polish ), so I thought I would post it:

Love and the Measles

My brother Tom, eighteen months to my junior, and I lovingly shared many things in our youth, back in the wonderful years of the fifties and sixties.  But one event I was not going to accept from  him no matter how much we loved each other.

The year was 1961, June to be exact, the last day  of the  first grade with Mrs. McLaren.  My life would soon became a series of warm summer nights, bike rides, swimming,  mosquito bites, running barefoot and wearing shorts.

I  happily cleaned out my desk, bringing home used workbooks and old papers signifying: school's out for summer. My first full year of school was completed.  

But a cloud of the doom was hanging over the day.

The night before my brother was  struck with the red measles, or as my mother would say, "hard measles."   It landed at our house with the horrid stench of vomit (down the side of the couch-a side I never sat on until it was recovered) and a high fever.  My mother diagnosed his virulent strain of spots and symptoms in a matter of minutes.   This was not to be taken lightly.  I, his loving older sister,  would have to be protected from the  ensuing dangers measles could bring.

Protection meant one thing: a shot!  A hypodermic needle of unknown length  to a six year old little girl like me was the behemoth of terrors.  After an emergency stomach pumping at age two, I had developed a fear of anything medical or dressed in white,  and a shot was the H-bomb.

Remember since this was the last day of school and we were cut lose at noon, I had some time to set up my strategy and attempt  to sell the idea to my mother regarding the pending injection, and how it was so unnecessary.  A waste of her time and mine.

"I'll simply come into the house by the front door and go directly to my room and shut the door.   I'll stay there as long as need be, weeks-doesn't matter.  I've got all summer.  I'll eat in my room. I won't be anywhere near  Tom.   Therefore, no need for a shot."   Simple, clean cut and best of all, shot free.

It was a no-sale, an adamant no-sale.  Fell in its entirety on deaf ears.

Before the sun set, on the last day of school, I was hauled  to the clinic, the old  St.Luke's Pediatric Department with its yellow painted walls so firmly housed in my memory, and given a  penicillin (I presume) shot on my cute little back side.  A shot that was intended to lessen the severity  of the measles, so lovingly shared by brother.

Funny, in thinking back, I do not remember every getting those dreaded measles.