More soccer and less worry about mumps

WEDNESDAY. I’m still in Toowoomba’s St Vinnie’s Hospital but I seriously believe it won’t be many more days before I go home.

As I’ve indicated before, this stay has given me plenty of time to watch television and satisfy my thirst for news. One piece of news today was the occurrence of measles in a small number of children down south.

There were dire warnings about the seriousness of the disease if it’s not effectively treated. The warning has taken me back to my own childhood and the range of diseases that impinged on my brother and me and were regarded as almost normal in primary and secondary school kids.

We didn’t worry about them and it was almost taken for granted that we would catch at least one before we grew up. In fact, we tended to worry more if we didn’t share in the general epidemics than if we did.

The wisdom of the time was that it was better to get some of these diseases as a child rather than as a young adult.

In addition to measles, I am thinking of nuisances like whooping cough, chickenpox, mumps, and even scarlet fever. A good dose of mumps, for example, was far from nice, but better out than in!

Scarlet fever was probably the most feared of all these childhood diseases. News that one of our friends had been struck down sent shivers through us all, but the bonus of several days off school was compensation for any pain, fever or sore throats.

A nice dose of chickenpox made you itch but rarely did any harm.

I was in primary school in the 1950s when the real fears were scarlet fever and, even more so, polio – or infantile paralysis as it was often called then. I remember that we were queued up in school to receive various government-provided injections to mitigate the effect of various diseases.

Infantile paralysis was of the greatest concern and we were, for example, often kept away from the local swimming pool, believing that would minimise our chance of catching the disease.

Thanks to being twins, we basically had twice the chance of catching any of these diseases. Indeed, if we played our cards properly, we could get many days of extra school holiday for fear that the Swannell boys could be a real threat to the other nine year olds because one or other of us was not well.

I recall being genuinely terrified by the possibility of catching infantile paralysis in particular. For reasons unknown to me, my brother or even the general practitioner, I began the habit of forcing myself to do exercises before getting out of bed.

A session of pretending to ride my bike with vigorous leg movements was enough to reassure myself about my state of health.

Being also a young boy who tended to vomit frequently, I was particularly thankful when my first days of these morning exercises passed without the need to run to the toilet.

Keeping away from the loo until after breakfast convinced me that I would be well for the rest of the day and I needn’t worry about unknown childhood diseases.

I do not dismiss the diseases such as smallpox or measles as being trivial. I simply believe that if you identify exercise routines that require total concentration and successfully complete them, then you will have set yourself up for another healthy day. More soccer and less worrying!

If my brother was also free from disease, it was a bonus and my mother could carry on with her knitting without having to worry about her sons’ health!

As I remember it, a mother with twins spent most of her knitting!