Where to Begin?

I was born in the muggy summer heat in the bayou city of Houston, in the great state of Texas, in June of 1957. It was not a very auspicious beginning. My parents were healthy 27-year olds, but there was a problem. My mother was RH- and my father was RH+. What that means is virtually from the moment of my conception, my mother’s body was fighting to rid itself of the parasitic being lodged in her womb.

Nowadays, modern medicine can fix the problem of RH incompatibility between a fetus and a mother with a simple injection. But in 1957 there were no injections, and so I was born in a very poor state of health. I don’t recall the number of blood transfusions I received in the first three days of my life, but Daddy always said I looked just like a little pincushion.

There were no neonatal care units in the hospitals in 1957. There were only doctors in white lab coats and nurses in starched white uniforms. Medical care was determined by people, not by machines. Hermann Hospital came equipped only with a standard maternity ward and nursery, but the nurses there took very good care of me. My liver was not functioning at first, and I was quite jaundiced and sickly-looking. The doctors told my parents that they might could “go in there” and clean out my bile ducts, but there was nothing they could do for my liver. For three long days my parents waited in terrified suspense while I clung to life like a tiny mewling kitten.

Luckily for me, however, my liver did finally begin to function, and I slowly began to thrive. Mama was sent home from the hospital after the requisite 10 days, but I spent three weeks in the hospital before I was allowed to come home. Daddy came to see me every evening when he got off work, but my poor mother was "confined" to home as was the practice of the day. I can only imagine her anxiety and distress while she waited. On the day of my release, as a word of warning, the doctor also told my parents that I would always be a rather weak and sickly child, prone to illnesses and infections. He must have scared my poor parents to death.

Something I probably should have told you at the beginning was that I was not my parents’ first child. (That’s the problem with these life stories. Life is rarely linear; it has all kinds of twists and turns, and until you have the whole background, nothing makes sense as it should.) My parents had already lived through the terror and grief of losing a child once before.

My parents were married in February 1950. They were both 20 years old. They had a one weekend honeymoon in New Orleans and then came back to Houston to resume their lives. But to their great surprise, my mother had become pregnant on her wedding night and almost exactly 9 months to the day, in November 1957, they had a baby boy.

My brother was not as fortunate as me. Again, there were complications because of my parents' RH incompatibility. He only lived a few hours and then he died. My parents were grieving and shell-shocked. They had not even been married one full year, and already they had had to bury a child. It took them seven years to work up the courage to try again. My mother once told me that if I had died also, she would have never tried to have another child. It was just too hard for her.

But, obviously, this time the story had a happier ending. And at the tender age of three weeks, my parents were finally able to bring me home.