Sticking Plaster Plastic Surgery
Excerpt from Remembrances of Rosabelle Larsen Schneider, My Mother
By Her Son Dallas Max Schneider
All of the Larsen family helped
milk the cows. Rose and her sisters washed the milk buckets and cans clean
every day. One day she slipped and fell on the protruding socket that held the
pails handle. It
cut
like a knife through her lower lip and slashed it open from the upper lip to
the chin. It hung in two
separate pieces, bleeding profusely.
Grandfather hurriedly hitched up
his horses and drove as fast as he could to Logan, the only place there was a
doctor. Grandmother held Rose in her arms with a towel place on her torn lip.
The doctor was not in his office and unavailable, so they went to Grandfather's
sister's home, known to us as, "Aunt Steeny." Aunt Steeny, (her real
name was Hansine Larsen Anderson) was skilled in many medical things and when
she had stopped the bleeding of Rosabelle's terrible wound she had Grandfather
go to the store and buy some sticking plaster.
She mixed the plaster together to
the thickness she desired and then carefully pulled the severed lip together
and placed the sticking plaster over the wound and held it there until it
became solid and unyielding. They left this mold on Rose's lip for some time and
when it was removed it had healed beautifully, leaving only a thin red line
that eventually went away leaving no scar. Had the doctor been available and
had attended Rose, he would have put several stitches in her lip and the
disfigurement of this beautiful child would have been everlasting ugliness.
When she would tell us about her
cut lip, she would have to show us children the almost invisible white line that
was hard to see. It
went
from the top of her lip to her chin. It
was
a vicious severing. I have no idea what sticking plaster was but it was Aunt
Steeny's primitive form of plastic surgery and it worked a miracle upon our
Mother.
No comments:
Post a Comment