Scarlet fever

I once had a disease called scarletina. It's the same thing as scarlet fever, though you will never get my mother to admit as such (just as you will never get her to admit a tornado took down those three giant elm trees at the old homestead, but didn't touch the house 30 feet to the South). Once mom learns her facts, she doesn't like changing them.

The "fact" in this case, is that scarletina is "milder" than scarlet fever. Do any of y'all remember stories from the 19th century where scarlet fever was a horrible disease that people died of, or spent months in recovery for it, and ended up blind or something? Yeah, that disease.

Well, it's actually pretty basic. It's an untreated case of strep throat. With no treatment it becomes toxic, and after that if it isn't treated, it becomes potentially lethal.

I don't know why it went from being "scarlet fever" to "scarletina" but I suspect it was a lot of people saying, "Well it didn't kill 'em, so it couldn't have been scarlet fever, but I for damn sure thought that's what it was. Let's call it...um...scarletina. Little scarlet fever. Yeah, that'll work."

So it's the same disease, except people don't die of it any more because there are now treatments for it. Antibiotics and aspirin and such.

I knew I was sick, the day I had it. My mom had gone to her friend Ruthie's, to help her re-cover her sofa or make curtains or something. My sister and brother got to go along, and if I'd been feeling normal I would have been upset I was being left behind. I loved hanging out with Ruthie's three sons! But I didn't care, which really should have tipped everyone off. My grandmother took care of me instead, and for once she came to our house, instead of me going to hers. (Her house was across our yard.) I remember when she took a nap--she always took a nap, purportedly to get us children to sleep, but 90% of the time she would sleep and we'd just play or something. Once we took the unsupervised opportunity to butter our grandfather's head as HE slept, but I digress.

Grandma was taking care of me, and while she slept, as I lay there I scraped my ring on the texture of the wall, because it made this really cool echoing sound! I can't describe it very well, but it was like the SFX when the Million Dollar Man used to jump or run? Yeah, like that. For those of you who weren't blessed enough to grow up in the 70s, here's William Shatner to explain it to you:



So I was laying there, thinking that maybe now I could run 65 MPH. Except my skin felt really weird, like sandpaper. Meh, whatever, I didn't particularly care because that sound was so cool! I tried to wake up Grandma and have her listen, but that was a mistake. Eleanora never had the patience to listen to REAL sounds, let alone pay attention to a little girl who was acting unusually docile and whose skin could be used at 220 grit. So she didn't notice anything wrong.

Which made her feel really guilty when Mom got home and freaked out because I was obviously, seriously ill.

Well, no problem because then Grandma got to babysit BeerHound and The Boy while she ran me to the Emergency Room.

They downplayed it.

"No it's not Scarlet Fever, it's just Scarletina!" Mom kept saying. Because, ya know, people die of one but not the other.

Hey, that re-naming thing worked! However, I doubt Mom will EVER believe that they're the same thing. Because Dr. Holmstrom said so! He'd never lie!

(For the record, he lied to her all the time to get her to calm down.)

Maybe that's where I learned how to do it!