Hospitals

by Jonni Ellsworth (excerpt from her memoirs)

I have always lived in or near hospitals and sometimes it seems my life has been ruled by them. I was born in February, 1944 in the Philadelphia Naval Complex at the shipyard as my father was in the Navy. It would be over a year before he returned from the World War II pacific theatre. He had been educated first at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and then medical school at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and residency at Cornell Medical Center in New York City. When the war broke out he was working as an internist at the state tuberculosis sanitarium in Ithaca and not so long after I was born, my mother and older sister, age 2 1/2, returned to Ithaca to live.

When he returned in the summer of 1945, we moved from our apartment on Buffalo Street to one attached to and opening into the hospital and he resumed work with TB patients. I remember little of this period up to that apartment but I do remember it. By then, I was 2 1/2 years old and walking and talking. I discovered-most likely by following him- that he sometimes didn't pay attention to quiet children below a certain height and that exploring the wards and getting to know the patients was a matter of staying close to the high desk that the receptionist sat in at the hospital's front hall so she couldn't see me and when she was distracted, darting through the glass doors into the wards. I usually didn't get very far until one of the orderlies spotted me and I was escorted firmly back to my apartment. The patients who were contagious were kept behind locked doors in separate wards so I wasn't in any real danger but I became quite used to large people in white coats, the smells of the wards and labs with their interesting equipment.

What I didn't become familiar with was other children my age to play with except when my mother made the effort to contact the families on the grounds for a play date. Most of their children were older so often my sister Ann (11 months older than me) and I played with each other. When she went to kindergarten, it was pretty lonesome. Mom would read to me and I could go visit the head of the hospital maintenance who lived in a building we called the "H" building. He had a female beagle who regularly supplied the hospital environment with puppies. The visits were cut short when one of the physicians acquired a German shepherd trained as an attack dog to, "teach his son responsibility." The dog was disposed of after it bit a policeman called out to investigate and had to be euthanized.

When I was old enough to attend kindergarten, my life perked up a bit.