linnugripiblog

ühtlasi palve - küsige, kas teie vanemad sugulased mäletavad midagi 1918a gripipandeemiast Eestis ja kirjutage siia kommentaaridesse :)

lugu 1.
In the fall of 1918, Clara was a young woman and lived with her mother in a small apartment near the Danforth and Jones Ave. When her mother became sick, the doctor was summoned. "It's the flu," he said after a brief examination. "She's in God's hands."

Coughing and shaking from fever and chills, her mother grew weaker with every passing hour. Nothing Clara did seemed to help. Worried and frightened, she kept glancing out the bedroom window of their second-floor apartment, watching the endless line of hearses and carts that wheeled up the puddles and ruts of Danforth, then a dirt road. As far as you could see, nothing but mourners and their sad processions.

It had been days and days of families bringing their dead to the cemeteries on the outskirts of Toronto. It seemed to Clara that the flu was killing everyone it touched. As she sat there worrying and listening to her mother's raspy breaths, she noticed a big barrel of oranges in front of the corner grocery across the street. She didn't know whether it would help or not, but she just had to get some oranges.

Pocketing a few coins, Clara threaded her way through the endless line of mourners jamming the street, and marched up to the grocer's store. She had enough money for nearly a dozen oranges, and she spent every cent. One by one, the grocer dropped them into a paper bag.

Clara raced back across the street and up the stairs to her mother. She sliced open each orange, and squeezed all the juice into a cup. Teaspoon by teaspoon, she held them to her mother's lips. It took hours to finish all the juice.
By morning, her mother's fever had all but disappeared, and in a few days, was gone. And the Spanish flu that only days before had been taking the lives of young and old seemed to just fade away. Fewer and fewer mourners trudged along the Danforth. Soon enough, they stopped.

lugu 2
In 1918 my grandfather Dr. Charles W. L. Clark was a doctor in Toronto. He was one of the few ear, nose and throat specialists in this city but during the flu epidemic everybody with any kind of medical background was pressed into service. He was seeing patients day and night in their homes. He often spoke of how terrible it was to answer those house calls only to find that his patients had died.

He described one particularly tragic incident when he arrived at a patient's home late in the evening, his last call of the day. No one answered the front door, but it was open, so he went in. He found two children dead in the living room, then went upstairs and found the mother dead in the bedroom with her baby dead in the bassinette beside her.
link artiklile