Measles

The recent outbreak of measles is frightening and so unnecessary. I am one of those people who get sick very easily, so often that I cringe when I hear someone cough in the next room.

I had measles during the last week of school a few months before my 7th birthday. I remember looking out my bedroom window on a cool June evening, watching my friends play, managing to get some of them to come and talk to me. My school prize that year was a small cedar box. I still have the box, and, almost seven decades later, it still has a faint odor of cedar, a smell that invariably transports me back to that awful time of sore eyes and throat, a bad cough, unpleasant salty taste in my mouth, and, of course, spots all over my body, giving me a hot and painful itch.

I had all what were then the usual childhood diseases. I was really sick with all of them and remember each episode in sometimes disgusting detail. I missed many weeks of school, especially in the elementary grades.

A few years ago I remember thinking how wonderful it is that children can be vaccinated against all the viruses that knocked me out all those years ago. While there may not be many deaths from measles, there are some, and infection sometimes results in lifelong disabilites, including blindness and deafness. Preventable. Yet another American tragedy.