I was born in 1946 in Idaho. My brother was born in 1949 in Oregon. These two facts could give one the impression my parents were a bit, shall we say, nomadic. That impression would be correct.
My dad was a baker and a bit of a free spirit, and Mom was happy to be wherever Dad was. So when the urge struck, Dad would find a job in The Bakery Times, or whatever, in a town that sounded good, and we would move there. At least that was the story we were told, but I have come to believe there was another reason: They were looking for a doctor.
In the late ’40s and early ’50s, there were no hemophilia treatment centers, and finding a doctor who knew more about hemophilia than how to spell it was, shall we say, difficult. Mom and Dad were told by one doctor there was really no such thing as hemophilia; another doctor felt everyone was a hemophiliac at some point in their life. But usually the doctors would just shake their heads and say there was nothing they could do. So Mom and Dad moved from town to town looking for someone who could help.
My parents moved to every semi-large town in the Pacific Northwest looking for someone—anyone—who could help. They were desperate. Unfortunately, they were also poor, and no mad Russian monks were offering up any miraculous solutions. I know that on at least one occasion Mom spent most of a day on a bus taking my brother, who had a major bleed going, to a hospital in Portland. They were gone for several weeks, and all the hospital could do was give my brother transfusions of whole blood.
Later, in history class, I could understand how Rasputin came to have such a hold on the Czar and Czarina. Rasputin may have smelled bad and had some rather un-monk-like habits, but he seemed able to ease the Czarevich’s pain and perhaps even lessen the severity of a hemorrhage. Czar Nicholas was one of the most powerful men in the world, but his son, the Czarevich Alexei, was a hemophiliac, and in that regard Nicholas was just as helpless as my dad.
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Now, the thing about bakers is that they work at night. As he worked, Dad would listen to the radio. One night a doctor was interviewed, and in the course of the interview he mentioned hemophilia and seemed to know more than just how to spell it. The next day Dad wrote a letter to the doctor and sent it off in care of the radio station. Against all odds, the station forwarded the letter to the doctor, and the doctor wrote back to Dad.
I’m not sure what either letter said, but Dad told me many years later that the doctor said that if he had two boys with hemophilia, he would move to Michigan because they were doing a lot of research. Actually, he mentioned another state or two, but that conversation was about 50 years ago and I can’t remember what those states were. Anyway, Dad’s family was originally from Michigan, and he still had a lot of family there, including his brother, so that was where we moved.
We took a bus to the little town of Tecumseh because that was where the brother lived, and we stayed there because Mom felt my brother and I shouldn’t be moved from school system to school system. We arrived in time for Mom to enroll me in that year’s first-grade class, which meant we would be in Tecumseh for at least the next 15 years when my brother, who was three years younger, would, with luck, graduate.
Tecumseh was also just 40-some miles from Ann Arbor, where they were doing all that research. Mom could drive that in less than an hour on a normal day and, as she was to demonstrate several times over the years, in less than half an hour when she felt the occasion warranted. Tecumseh also had a doctor who kept a couple units of AHG (the charmingly named Anti-Hemophiliac Globulin) because he treated another pair of brothers who had hemophilia. What were the odds that a small farm town of 4,000 would already have two hemophiliacs living in it? My parents felt this was a sign of sorts.
Naturally, because treatment was theoretically within easy reach, my brother and I obligingly had no bleeds for just over a year. Mom and Dad were seriously thinking of moving back to the Pacific Northwest, even if it meant making at least one school transfer, when I decided to test the effectiveness of this AHG. But I think I’ll tell that story starting with the next installment.
Read more Guy Boss at the Missing Factor.