Life Goes On

So life chugged on in my first years with a routine revolving around eating, Dr’s visits and Birth-to-three (Marty, Rhonda and Ruth) visits. Even though I spent a lot of time with medical issues, the specifics are boring and have thankfully slipped from my memory. Suffice it to say that I had more hospital visits than I care to remember, Emergency room and hospitalizations and specialists visits. I do remember that when we went to a new Doctor or the Emergency Room (which was often), mom and dad would always tell the nurse that they would need several people to take blood for testing (which they did every visit). And the nurse would always respond “OK” with a “you’ve got to be kidding, he’s just a Down Syndrome baby” tone of voice. They had no idea how physically strong I was and how well I hid it. Most blood draws resulted in dad laying across my chest, mom holding my feet and two or three nurses / Doctors holding my arms !


And as I said earlier, I developed projectile vomiting – an enviable trait under the right circumstances if you can do it on demand. Once, mom went to see the Town of Hamden Student Transportation Department to “explain” why sis needed to be picked up at our house instead of the “regular” school bus stop. The regular bus stop was at the end of our street and mom couldn’t either leave me home or take me with her to the corner to wait for the bus with sis. In spite of numerous calls to numerous people and explaining my situation, the town wasn’t being very cooperative. Then, mom went to town hall to explain in person and show me to them so they could see that she wasn’t lying (Hamden’s approach on transportation is to assume that you are lying to get special treatment). During the meeting, and almost as if on command, I projectile vomited on the nice man’s suit just as mom had finished explaining to him that projectile vomiting was one of the issues she dealt with. The bus was at our front door the next day !

Now, this is not to say that Hamden was uncooperative about me – remember this was sis’s bus we were talking about. I hadn’t even entered the school system yet – I was just a baby in a car seat.

All this does bring to mind specific memories. Tomorrow I will start to tell you about them, stories like “When mom ran over the dog ……”