Mumps, Measles and Chicken Pox

The Okie Blogger Bash Consortium topic of the week: childhood diseases!

In '92, our children contracted chicken pox (aka, "the chicken pops"). It was a goodly case of it; each child got quite a good covering of it. Our then-five year-old daughter amazed us by requesting that she have her picture taken in full bloom. "But why," I asked incredulously? "Because I heard on the TV that they will have a shot for chicken pox next year, and I want to be able to show my children and grandchildren what it looked like!" We duly snapped pics of the pox, and were amazed at our sweetie's prescience.

Our friends in the neighborhood, the Powells, asked if they could bring their boys over to be exposed, wanting to "get it over with." They hung out with our boys, but no pox from their close encounters with our bairns. They did contract it about a month and a half later from another source.

Once, in Tchula, where I served my first congregation, I was also the teacher for what was known as the "Tchula Bible Class." The class consisted of about 40 elementary and junior high black children from the housing project. Their leader was an illiterate tractor driver known as Moot. Moot asked me to teach the class on Sunday afternoons at the community room at the project. The children were fantastic students, eagerly listening to my lessons in the Gospels. They took to catechism and Scripture memorization with great relish.

One day in the Sunday afternoon class, one of the little girls, nick-named "Nini" (knee-knee), came into the classroom in full mix of chicken pox eruption and crustation, and sat down right next to me. I was astounded that someone would let her out of her apartment, but the children rarely had supervision of any consistent sort. When I got home, I immediately sprayed a cloud of Lysol and walked forward and backward through it, and put my clothes into the washing machine. Marie was expecting our youngest at the time, and we didn't want any complications.

My time under the pox was soothed the good old-fashioned way: calomine lotion, liberally applied (I could have used a paint roller, but my folks weren't too enamored with that idea). My mom one day told me that I'd be getting a call from my first grade teacher that afternoon; we were to work on reading and arithmetic over the phone. I don't remember reading, but I vividly remember adding and subtracting bottle caps collected by my mom into and out of custard cups at the behest of my teacher. Mrs. Sharpe was indeed that. I thought it an honor to be called by my teacher; I was bored out of my skull.

Our children never had mumps or measles; the MMR vaccine precluded that. I remember having one of the forms of measles in kindergarten, not the largish red variety, but smaller red bumps. I think they were called "three day measles." I do remember being pretty feverish.

Mumps were wretched. I was 11, and it was summer. I was pretty swollen on both sides, and one night I was in such pain that I just cried and cried. My mother, who was pregnant at the time, came in to console me, to little avail. I think I eventually fell asleep from exhaustion. Mom contracted mumps on one side, the other side having been infected when she was a child. Her adult case of the mumps was tough; she lost my sibling soon after.