Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 7 3
Q: What did they say was wrong?
A: Just, I had the hiccups, hiccups is a spasm of the diaphram, is what
it. And they put me in ice water and I remember one time they give
me--they said, "Do you drink?" And I said, "No, not habitually." So
they brought me a glass with the best tasting whiskey I ever tasted.
Several years after that I had, the Red Cross, I'm getting ahead of
myself, the Red Cross paid my bill and they sent me a notice. I
reimbursed the Red Cross because the hospital fees were not much, they
didn't cost me anything. They didn't cost me anything when I had a heart
attack that time in Milwaukee, but I carry a card in my pocket now that
anytime I need to go to a Veterans Hospital all I got to do is present
that card and they'll take me right into the hospital.
Q: Back to some of the things that the housewives did, do you remember
if they saved grease and . . . .
A: Yes, they did. There was prizes given for canned goods with labels
on them and a lot of them saved those labels and turned them in and then
they got premiums. I started to tell you about later on I had this
hiccups again. That was several years later and they took me to St.
~ohn's Hospital and Dr. Koeningsburg was my doctor. They did everything
they could think of to do to stop them. They called Dr. Stocker from the
T.B. (Princess) Sanitarium and that was before it was closed down. They
took me up and they cut on this side. There is a scar there across here,
that's what they call the vagus nerve.
Q: On your neck there?
A: Yea. And they said that ought to stop them. Well, it didn't. So
then the next day they took me up and they cut the vagus nerve on this
side of my neck. There is a scar right down there that you can't see on
account of my collar now. That stopped them and they fixed my bed when I
got home. The head of the bed had two pieces of four by four and they
raised it up, the head of my bed and I had to sleep like this with my
head up higher than my feet. 1 haven't had the hiccups since. That was
fifteen or twenty years ago.
Q: Well, that's a terrible thing to have the hiccups so long. Did
somebody ever try to scare you out of them?
A: Well, they scared me, they had me blowing in a paper bag and the
Jefferson Barracks had a tub that had ice water and they bathed me in
that. They did everything, anytime anybody suggested anything, they
tried it.
Q: They were kind of experimenting on you then?
A: Well, nothing was doing it, stopping them so they just kept it up
till they could stop them.
Q: Do you remember if people who had sons in the war placed a star in
the window, didn't they, for every son that they had in the war?