House Calls

copyright by Ruth Lampert June 2008

“What’s a House Call, Mommy?”
No kid, a “house call” isn’t when you call your brother from your bedroom on your cell phone to his bedroom on his cell phone. And no, smartie, it isn’t a greeting one dwelling makes to another.
When you overheard Grandma say to Grandpa, “I wish we still had house calls,” she was talking about something that existed in the old days (not necessarily “good,” but definitely “gone”) before there were things like cell phones and computers and HMO’s.

I myself am old enough to remember House Calls, so let me explain how they worked. When you were sick, you called the doctor, and spoke to him (rarely was it a “her) or his nurse (almost always a “her.) He said things like “How high is your temperature?” “Put ice on it” and the classic “take two aspirins and call me in the morning.”

If you were still sick the next day, he drove to your house before he went to the office. Yes, that’s right, he drove right up to your house himself, carrying a reassuring black bag (no, not a backpack) full of magical potions and pills as well as a stethoscope and thermometer. Lots of times just the sight of him and his black bag was enough to start the patient back on the road to health. Usually he was a little portly, a little bald, with a kindly smile If you were a child, he seemed elderly. No matter how old you were, he seemed wise.

Sometimes people called in the middle of the night, and the doctor might be a little cross and say “Why did you wait so long to call me?”
before recommending you take two aspirins and call him in the morning. l. If you were really in bad shape, he’d come over, in spite of his wife’s grumbling that he let his patients take advantage of him.
Call 911? That hadn’t been invented yet. Yes, of course we had police and firemen, and ambulances to rush people to the hospital after accidents and heart attacks, but I have no idea who you had to call or what you had to do to get one. Perhaps you could make that your project and report back to us. .

I also remember the days before antihistamines. My periodic attacks of hives were presumed to be the result of an allergy, but to what no one knew (somehow “strawberries” were high on the list of usual suspects.) The only thing that brought a measure of relief was Calamine lotion, liberally applied. *

I even remember the dawn of “wonder drugs.” I have written elsewhere about my camp experience with kosher food and strep throat and I recall that when I was sent back home with the mother of all sore throats, Doc Kraut dashed over immediately from his office above the corner drug store, (which also supplied marvelous ice cream drinks at the soda counter, but that’s another story, which will probably eventually appear on this blog.). Doc was more jovial than usual as he said, “You’re lucky you came down with this now instead of last year. Now we have medicine, called Sulpha that cures it. You’ll be up and about in no time.”
And I was. It wasn’t until many years later that I developed an allergy to sulfa, and then to the even more wonderful wonder drug Penicillin. These reactions could have finished me off; fortunately in each case huge dose of antihistamines cured the cure that was worse than the disease. But I digress.

Returning to the theme of House Calls:
They were still an accepted part of life the night my Dad died in his sleep. I remember my mother on the phone, not to 911, but to Doc Kraut. The next thing I knew he was huffing and puffing up the three flights of stairs to our apartment. He looked very stricken himself; he and my Dad had been buddies for lots of years.

He came out of the bedroom where my Dad was still stretched out on the bed and said in a shaky voice, “There’s nothing I can do... He’s gone.” I don’t know if I if I actually cried out “But you have to do something, or he’ll die!” or if I just thought it to myself. And I don’t know if under the same circumstances today a call to 911 would be life-saving. It’s pretty certain that the high blood pressure he had had for years would be treated. And who knew about cholesterol back then? So you see, it cuts both ways.

But back to olden, though not quite so golden, times: we were living in Tucson when Brian, then about 11 years old, was bitten by a spider, and had a severe reaction. The local doctor came over right away and took care of him – and of me, the anxious mom. Now you’ll probably think I’m making this next part up, but I swear it’s true: Two days later I got a call from the doc, saying “You know, I’m not easy in my mind yet about our young man. I’m going to be making a house call this evening right down your street, so I’ll drop by and see him just to ease my mind.”
I don’t know if he charged for that visit or not. Probably not – after all, he was in the neighborhood and it only took a couple of minutes to “ease his mind.” (His mind!)

The way we paid the doctor was different then too. . You’ve probably heard your folks talk about “HMO’s” and “Health Benefits” and maybe even “Medicare” – all that stuff hasn’t really been around for so very long, not per my time table. …

During times when there wasn’t much money, which, in my particular case seems to have been times beyond number, I sent the doctor $10.00 a month toward our balance. It was like a little annuity for him (I’ll explain “annuity” another time, honey). Month after month, year after year, that $10.00 came in regular as clock work, because as soon it came close to being paid off, someone else in the family got sick. From his point of view, I guess getting a whole lot of ten dollars every month, plus the money the rich patients paid in fall, added up o.k. (This was in the city – I don’t think he ever got paid in potatoes or chickens the way country doctors did. Or so I have heard.)

We old timers have lots of stories like this to tell. We tell them because, for one thing, that’s what old timers do.
Hey, you knew when you logged on this wasn’t MyFace.com. .

*Author’s note: Out of curiosity I just checked Google to see if Calamine lotion is still available – it is, but guess what; sometimes there is a severe allergic reaction...