I think even my five-year-old self thought it was pretty inefficient to make me part of whatever their system was, but I held onto the paper and I got upset when some people pushed the sleeping man away from me. I complained aloud, and I remember someone (female?) approaching me and asking “And what are you doing here?” which did nothing to reassure me. All of the people who worked there seemed clueless about their jobs! I told this person that I’d been watching a sleeping man across the hall who was no longer there because some people had wheeled him away, and she acted like I made no sense and took the paper from me and looked at it. The next thing I knew, the door behind me opened and my chair was swiveled into a room. I was lifted from the chair onto a table-like surface, and wet strips of something like white cloth were laid across my eyes. Even so, I saw the steel strainer-like thing as it was lowered over my nose and mouth.

Then there were colors, all colors but especially vivid oranges and reds, and they spiraled before my cool-covered eyes. I heard a screaming chanting “Mom-mee, Mom-mee.” I think I remember the pressure of restraint; I recall feeling pushed into the surface on which I lay. Afterwards, I was told what I heard were my own screams. Long afterwards, I learned from an anesthesiologist that ether acts on us like alcohol, and children don’t like being drunk, and so ether isn’t used on children now. I know I hated it.

When I woke up I was in a bed and the bed was moving. Someone was guiding it into an elevator and down some halls to a huge room. Once we stopped moving, I realized there were raised sides on the bed like a crib; I didn’t know even the adults had cribs there, and I felt indignant.

I also felt nauseated. Someone showed me how to raise my head and vomit into a metal pan. So I lay on my back in a crib, in pain and disorientation, lifting my head and turning to vomit with obnoxious regularity.

As it happened, I wasn’t the only kid who had a tonsillectomy in the 1950s: just the first in my cohort. Everyone else was promised all the ice cream he or she could eat. I wasn’t told what would be done to me and I wasn’t promised anything. I was offered ginger ale.

I spent the night in that crib in that big room in that inhospitable hospital. It seemed to me then that I didn’t sleep at all. In the middle of the long dark time, I heard what sounded like a family chatting in their kitchen. I figure now it must have been medical folks talking and dealing with bottled supplies, but there were conversations involving a male voice, a female voice and a voice like that of a boy on the verge of adolescence, and I heard what sounded like the opening and closing of a refrigerator door and the clanking of glass on glass or metal. Those people sounded cozy and comfortable and I remember wanting to be with them but feeling unwelcome, uncomfortable, angry, sad.