QUARANTINE: THINKING ABOUT EBOLA

Our house was once quarantined because I was sick.

I had a sore throat and a fever, but I was a child prone to strep infections, so a sore throat and fever were nothing new. But this sore throat rapidly became worse than it ever had been before, my fever went higher, my tongue coated white, I had chills and broke out in a sand-papery red rash. My mother took me to the doctor. We rode the bus because we didn't have a car back then. The doctor said I had scarlet

I understand this look.

fever and that my mother shouldn't take me home on the bus. He said scarlet fever was a dangerous, contagious illness and that it was his job - and our job - to make sure other children didn't catch it. He said go home and stay home and said I had to stay in bed and rest. My mother took me home - I don't remember how we got there - and tucked me in, pulled the shade, turned out the light, kissed me on my feverish forehead and told me to call her if I needed anything. She went to take care of my baby sister, who could not visit until I was well. The county health department came by not long after that and tacked a big yellow quarantine sign on our front door. It was a serious sign. And we obeyed it. Other people obeyed it too. We stayed put and they stayed away. No questions asked.

I was six years old. I would remain in bed for the better part of a month before the sign came down. Scarlet fever is a childhood disease that once killed many children and left others with damaged hearts and other disabling problems. It also is an illness that could panic whole neighborhoods, towns and schools when it turned up. Antibiotics eventually calmed both the illness and the fears - though the illness remains a danger without early treatment - but not in 1950 when I was sick. So the quarantine sign on our front door told the neighborhood - and the world - I was sick but not to worry, things were under control, a line had been drawn, a perimeter set up, their children were safe. 

I was confined to my bed in a darkened bedroom and could only leave to go to the bathroom. I am not sure why the room was kept dark, but for days I was too sick to care. Nausea, fever, sore throat, headaches, the rash. The doctor came to check on me from time to time. My mother fed me soup; I drank ginger ale (our family's traditional nausea remedy). 

And there was medicine. Awful tasting. Probably penicillin. Liquid. Several gagging doses a day. I hated it. I resisted. Finally I hated it so much I hid my red and white plastic dart pistol under my pillow and when my father came in with my evening dose and turned on the lamp, I jerked the pistol out and said, "If you try to make me take that I am going to shoot you."

My father, who had been a soldier in Italy in World War II only a few years before, took shooting and threats of shooting seriously. He also knew taking your medicine was serious business. He came down with rheumatic fever a few weeks after the Salerno invasion, spent a year in a hospital and barely survived. He calmly handed the medicine bottle and the spoon to my mother, snatched the little pistol out of my hand, jerked me up by the arm and, as I dangled over the bed, smacked my butt several times so hard that I never had trouble taking my medicine again. Ever. He said nothing. He spooned, I swallowed, he left the room. My mother dabbed at my tears with the corner of the sheet, tucked me in and turned off the lamp. I never saw the little red and white pistol again.

Years later I met a guy who was a kid down the block I never knew back then. He remembered those quarantine days,

My sign was yellow.

remembered being told by his parents to stay away from my house, to cross to the other side of the street when walking past, remembered boys daring each other to sneak up to my front door and touch the quarantine sign, remembered touching the sign himself, the thrilling feeling of tempting death, and running home to await his fate.

I recovered and infected no one else. The quarantine sign came down and no others went up.

I have been thinking about all of that recently. About the quarantine. About the way we stayed put and others stayed away. About how I took my medicine. About how I lived and the rest of the kids in the neighborhood went on living too. And about the deadly seriousness of Ebola and the dangers of playing at tempting death on a dare, like neighborhood children.