BIRTHDAY CATCH UPS - DENNIS

After reading Dennis' blog, I had to go find that picture of him with the broken collar bone.

He wore these straps to hold his shoulders back. They rubbed on his arm pits, so we added the sponges to help with that. I know it was painful to produce a smile, but he did. 

Many years ago when I was a young mother, I read a magazine article about Rose Kennedy.

 She was the mother of 9 children one of which became our 35th President, John F. Kennedy.

 One thing that stuck in my mind in that magazine interview was when they asked her how she kept track of all those children she said she kept a 3 X 5 index card for each one of them about their illnesses, shots, etc. I thought that seemed like a good idea and so I got out my medical records, and brushed off my memory and wrote down those similar things. I wish I could have done it as they occured, (and kept it up), but it still is pretty interesting. I shuffled them up and Dennis' came up first. Here goes . . .

Side Note: One morning Dennis and a few of his little friends were playing outside by the bread delivery truck. One of them had the idea to hang on to the bumper when the truck started to go. They let go, but Dennis still hung on.... I heard this awful screaming and thought my neighbor's child behind us had fallen down the stairs. About then, my front door bell rang and my neighbor across the street was holding Dennis and trying to tell me what had happened. (He saw the truck with Dennis hanging on, and was able to get the driver to stop). My neighbor put us in his car and drove us to the hospital. The first thing they did was give me a tranquilizer. I was two weeks overdue with Ruth and I think they were afraid I was going to go into labor. Then they started working on Dennis to pull out a lot a gravel he had embedded in his knees. Quite the exciting morning.

Chipped tooth

A couple of side notes:

Those hallucinations - - awful. For several weeks, not every night, but many, Dennis would wake up screaming the snakes were going to get him, or some other awful thing. Just when we thought they were over, a few nights would pass and back they came. The doctors checked to see if he had some kind of a spider bite or similar. Nothing. They asked if he could have gotten into our liquor cabinet and had some alcohol. His symptoms were like the DTs.  Since that wasn't a possibility, we wondered if he and his little friends might have tried something at one of their houses. Our good friends/neighbors said they always kept their liquor locked up. It still remains a mystery to this day, but it was pretty awful going through that.

Hernia operation: The football team players had to have a physical exam before they could play on the team. That's when they discovered the hernia. Goodbye football!