Ether

Do you know the taste of ether?  It is said there are five basic tastes of food: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami.  Ether isn’t on that list.  It has a taste of metal, like sucking on an aluminum popsicle although the encyclopedia says it has a hot, sweetish taste.  I’ve never tasted a Swede but suspect it’s different.  

People don’t know the taste of ether much anymore but after Morton’s demonstration of its ability to provide anesthesia (a term coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes at said demonstration) in 1842, it was used almost universally until the 1970’s to reduce the pain of surgery.  Surgery and pain were considered synonymous until Morton’s discovery.  It was still being used in the early 1950’s when I was reluctantly optioned off in the draft for a tonsillectomy.  I couldn’t say I was a “free agent” because I was at the bidding of my parents and the family doctor, the latter thinking that since penicillin wasn’t doing the job, maybe excision was the answer.  Thank goodness I didn’t have headaches.

One summer’s day I was trundled off to Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia.  This was a long way from the friendly environs of my West Philly home.  I guess I was five or six or seven.  Until then I had been enveloped in the warmth and security of my extended family and now here I was left all alone.  I was led to a cold, clean bed in a small ward of other juvenile prisoners of the Sisters of the Holy Family. I can say that without exaggeration because there were bars on the bed much like I suspected at Holmesburg Prison. I remember, and I remember very little of this adventure, my bed was near a window at the front of the hospital and as I looked out there were my parents getting into the car for their trip home.  ABANDONED! My heart sank, literally.  It was now located somewhere near my appendix.  Having been, and still am, an only child, there went my only connection to the world I knew and those that loved me. 

I had been assured that the stay would be brief and I would be going home the next day.  Assurances also included the promise of a cherry popsicle after surgery. Sometime that morning I was placed on a gurney – you know, the kind you see on television with the long white sheet draped over the body – and transported into the depths of the operating suite.  It was there that I first tasted ether.  Yuck!  Double that: Yuck! Yuck!

In the bed by the window I awoke sometime later that day, essentially intact, feeling pretty good except for the terrible pain in my throat.  And where was the popsicle?  That was nowhere to be found. “A promise made is a debt unpaid”.  I did get some milk and applesauce for lunch, but these were too painful to swallow.  Finally, that afternoon, the sister came around with the cherry popsicle.  Auuuuugh!  That hurt even worse.  (For a full and truer description of these things, listen to Bill Cosby’s monolog “Tonsils”). Voluntarily fasting until the next morning when oatmeal was offered I found it tolerable but not palatable.  Soon, my parents arrived and took me home.  Homeward bound.  Home at last.

James Littlefield Oct. 17, 2019 non-fiction