Part01-On Writing-03

Most of the nine months I should have spent in the first grade I spent in bed.

My problems started with the measles—a perfectly ordinary case—and then got steadily worse.

I had bout after bout of what I mistakenly thought was called "stripe throat" I lay in bed drinking cold water and imagining my throat in alternating stripes of red and white (this was probably not so far wrong) .

At some point my ears became involved, and one day my mother called a taxi (she did not drive) and took me to a doctor too important to make house calls—an ear specialist. (For some reason I got the idea that this sort of doctor was called an otiologist. )

I didn't care whether he specialized in ears or assholes.

I had a fever of a hundred and four degrees, and each time I swallowed, pain lit up the sides of my face like a jukebox.

The doctor looked in my ears, spending most of his time (I think) on the left one.

Then he laid me down on his examining table.

"Lift up a minute, Stevie," his nurse said, and put a large absorbent cloth—it might have been a diaper—under my head, so that my cheek rested on it when I lay back down.

I should have guessed that something was rotten in Denmark. Who knows, maybe I did.