Sunday, April 19, 2020
It’s a good thing our Father’s life’s work was saving lives.
After my big brother Jim, was born, he nearly died. He had a closure of the stomach into the intestines. Babies with that condition do not get any nourishment because they throw up anything they eat. Father was a Doctor and Mother was a Nurse and they knew it was Plyoric Stenosis. In 1934, there was no known cure for that problem.
Through Father’s desperate research and medical connections, he heard of a Doctor who was pioneering a new surgery for that condition. He was the only Doctor in the country who knew how to do that surgery. It was a miracle that Father found him. Jim was two months old when Father took him on the 4 hour drive from Marian, Virginia, up the Shenandoah Valley to a hospital in Stanton, Virginia to see that if that Doctor could help him.
When Mother handed him over to Father for the trip, Mother thought she would never see him again. At that time everybody knew everybody and so there was a lot of praying going on for his recovery. Grandmother Rodgers, our mother’s mother, and her whole church, Allisonia Pentecostal Holiness Church on New River, and all the relatives were very religious. Apparently they were very good at praying because he survived and thrived. It was another true miracle that he actually made it through the serious surgery after nearly starving.
There was a six inch scar from the emergency operation that saved his life. So as a very young child I figured out the difference between boys and girls. Boys have a scar on their stomach and girls do not.
A memory from little sister, Sarah Watkins Gray Tateosian
