The Things My Mother Did

 

My Mom took especially good care of me when I was a young boy. She was always there when I needed her when I got hurt or sick. This story describes a few of the things she did for me to keep me healthy.

 

 

 

The Things My Mother Did

 

When I was a young boy, my mother took very good care of me. She had these special things she did to cure me and keep me healthy. She always had three little round bottles in the medicine cabinet she used to put on cuts, scrapes, and scratches. She had mercurochrome, merthiolate, and iodine all sitting next to each other on the shelf. I never knew which one she was going to use on me when I got a cut, but she always seemed to know which one to use because I never ever got any infections. I do remember that the mercurochrome was the only one that didn’t sting like the devil so I was glad when she pulled it off the shelf rather than one of the other two.

 

 

Mom was always prepared to take care of my cuts, scrapes, and scratches to keep infections away.

 

 

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When I got stung by a wasp, my Mom would take one Bayer aspirin and hold it between her finger and thumb in a glass of water for a few seconds and then pull it out. She would mash it between her finger and thumb, then dab it on the wasp sting. Usually the sting would stop hurting within an hour. My Mom said the aspirin would pull the poison out of the sting. What a smart lady she was.

 

 

The wet aspirin treatment always made my wasp stings feel better.

 

 

 

Often when I was a boy I would get some kind of bacterial infection and would run a fever of 102 to 103 degrees F. My Mom kept a supply of Sulfa Drug on hand and she would start giving them to me immediately and I was usually back to my old self in 48 hours. I read recently that sulfa drugs were the first antibiotics that were systematically used. I guess she knew what she was doing.

 

Sulfa Drug Usually broke my fever in 48 hours or less. Thanks Mom.

 

 

 

I recall when I would get a bad cold, my Mom would feed me chicken soup until I got better. I read recently that the Mayo Clinic says there is no cure for the common cold, but they say chicken soup acts as an anti inflammatory and does make you feel better.

 

 

 I ate a lot of chicken soup when I had a bad cold. It always seemed to make me feel better.

 

 

I think we all owed our mothers a debt we could never repay. There’s a song by Jimmy Dean called  I. O. U. that describes very well what a mother does for her children. I played it on Mothers Day at one of our clog dance sessions and all the women there cried. Pull the song up on YouTube and give it a listen you’ll be touched.

 

 

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Thanks for reading The Things My Mother Did,
Bill