10

I spent probably the happiest eleven months of my life in that sanatorium. It was a place which opened my eyes to the world... My parents didn't come up for eleven months. Nobody, nobody came up because it was supposed to have been a secret. In those days, tuberculosis was a disease which you were supposed to conceal. It was almost like a venereal disease is now. And when my mother used to send me "care" packages of food and gifts and she would meet one of her sisters living in the area and they would see her, they would ask, "Where are you taking this?" "I am taking this to Charlie", she would say. "He is in college."
Cast out of the world of the healthy, tuberculosis patients created a world of their own in the sanatoriums. One young American patient, Betty MacDonald, who was a thirty-year-old working single mother of two girls when she found out she tuberculosis, describes entering the sanatorium world:
Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting down-town to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness, you remember nothing about the urgent errands. You can't even remember where you were going. The important things now are the pain in your leg; the soreness in your back; what will you have for dinner; who is in the next bed.
Patients could spend five, ten, even twenty years in a numbing routine of bed rest and meals. When first admitted to the sanatorium she calls "The Pines" in 1938, MacDonald had to spend every day lying down: that meant no reading, no talking, no laughing, no reaching too far out of bed to get things. Betty was informed sternly that her red hair would be a liability, as a red-head was likely to be viviacious and thus have difficulty lying still and solemn. Not lying still, she was told, would lead to death. Things did get better: after three months at the Pines, if you showed improvement, you could go outside on the sleeping porch and lie still, bundled in blankets against the cold. MacDonald began to think that life in the sanatorium would "make dying seem like a lot of fun."
Because patients lived in sanatoriums, sharing their rooms with total strangers, for months and years of their lives, the sanatorium world brought out the prejudice in people, and separate hospitals wre built for blacks and Native Americans to stay. Although it might have been hard for Betty MacDonald to imagine a worse place to spend the first years of her thirties, a young Lakota woman, Madonna Swan, wrote of a sanatorium stay that was even more dreadful and nearly deadly. Madonna Swan was just sixteen when she found she had tuberculosis. She had seen four schoomates suddenly begin to cough blood and rapidly die from the disease. She knew all too well where the chest pains and cough that she shared with them would lead, but Madonna was sent to the doctor before it was too late, and he sent her to the "Sioux San."
That was in 1944. During the first two years Madonna Swan spent at the Sioux San, no patient left alive - no one even went out on leave: the only patients to leave were the dead. The patients were all dressed in striped uniforms, like prisoners. Meals were beans and cornmeal spotted with mouse droppings. The healthier patients spent the morning bathing the sicker ones, and they all spent the afternoons from one to five lying on their beds with bean bags on their chests. Madonna's treatment consisted of four pounds of bean bags on the chest and one cup of cod-liver oil to drink daily. The bean bags were supposed to compress the lungs and suffocate the germs. After six years of this treatment, to doctor