I write this on the afternoon before Valentine’s Day. I have no big plans this year because I am only a week beyond surgery for a total knee replacement. I am still using a walker, taking a number of medications, concentrating on exercising my muscles and trying to eat well. Sleep has mostly eluded me even though I feel very tired. In the dark of night when the house is very quiet I feel the pain in my bones and the regrowth of nerves that were disturbed by the surgery. Moving forward now seems to dominate my thoughts from one day to the next. 

I’m mostly doing well. I have lots of support and I’ve been told that I am more advanced in my recovery that most people my age are at this stage of the recuperation game. I have much gratitude for the doctors and nurses who continue to check on me. I learn how to speed my recovery from a talented and dedicated physical therapist. My husband has faithfully cared for me and my daughter spent many sleepless night ministering to my needs. People have brought food and flowers to demonstrate their love and concern. I have little about which to complain but somehow given the date I am reminded of a long ago time when I was only nine years old and I contracted the measles. 

It was in February of 1958. I was in the fourth grade when an outbreak of measles found its way inside me. Before long I was coughing and raging with high fevers while a little red rash grew on my chest. It was the sickest I had ever felt in my life but I had little idea of how dangerous my illness actually was. I only noticed the concern in my mother’s eyes as she confined me to my room and kept my brothers from coming near me. 

There were no vaccinations for the measles back then. I was part of the generation that still had classmates with polio. I was one of the millions of pioneers who took the first vaccines for that dread disease and I remember hearing my mother and her lady friends discussing their concerns about the miracle shot that would save me and children all over the world from ending up like a neighbor who lived in an iron lung. The creation of an immunization for the measles was still in the future. 

It was a cold time in 1958 when I lay zoning in and out with a fever that made my head pound. I felt so weak that I was certain at one point that I would surely die. I was generally a healthy child so being confined to bed for days that led to more than a week was something that I had never before experienced. Worst of all was the isolation and the brain fog that seemed to envelop me. 

I could hear my family talking in other parts of the house and I longed to be with them but my mother patiently explained that my illness was very contagious and she did not want my brothers to become ill if it were possible to keep my germs from infecting them. So I sat in the darkness of my bedroom with the blinds closed so that the light from outside would not strain my eyes. I consumed doses of cough medicine and aspirin and my mother placed damp cloths on my forehead to ease the discomfort that seemed to be my constant companion. 

I was missing school and as each new day came and my symptoms had not begun to subside I worried that I would never catch up on the work that awaited my return to the classroom. Mostly I slept as though I was a modern day Rip Van Winkle. I sipped on soup lovingly made by my mother that was difficult to swallow with my sore throat. In my weakened state I imagined that death was only around the corner. 

There is an irony that in this moment of remembering how horrific my time with measles was, there are fewer and fewer children taking advantage of the miraculous vaccine that virtually eliminated the disease from the lives of young people. Through the miracle of research and medicine my own daughters have no idea how horrible the measles can be because they routinely received immunizations that have spared them from so many illnesses that still plagued the earth when I was a child. The world seems to have forgotten what it was like for little boys and girls to end up dangerously ill from a case of the measles. Such memories have grown old just as I have and with that amnesia is a dangerous movement to avoid inoculations for many diseases that were becoming more and more rare. Now there is a full blown crisis brewing among children contracting and spreading the measles. 

I truly wish that I might convey the horror of having the measles. My childhood memory of having the illness is still so real because the experience was so frightening. I made it but many people have died with the measles even as people worry more about the possible side effects of the vaccine than about the dangerous nature of actually experiencing the disease.

I would not wish a case of the measles on anyone. It was a terrible experience that is burned into my psyche. Right now I’m feeling twenty four seven pain from my surgery that does not compare to how badly I felt in that long ago time. I urge parents to give their children the gift of well being by getting them vaccinated before they learn the hard way what having the measles is like.