Mary Sisson's Blog, page 36

Quote of the day

The peat bogs are seen all over the northern part and are high on the mountains surprisingly enough. The peat is cut in the winter & stacked to dry & burned the next winter. It smells a house up much as grandpa used to when he voided down the hot air register.

Quote of the day

Doctors…view the world a little differently.

I am so glad the Easter flowers etc. arrived. I thought that if the children had small plants to put into the ground and to consider their own they might learn about the birds & the bees that way.

Progress report

I am DONE inputting the changes!! Whoo! (Oh my aching back!) Went from 41 chapters to 31 chapters, by the way—didn’t really lose much length, just combined too-short chapters.

So I’ll give it a week and another read, and then off to the beta readers!

Progress report

I inputted changes through what is now Chapter 18 and used to be Chapter 20. It’s taking a while, but hopefully I’ll be done tomorrow. I also lined up a couple of beta readers, so yay.

Progress report

Back onto Trials—I finished this editing pass and input changes for the first five chapters! Whoo!

Progress report

So, obviously I’ve been a bit focused on my grandfather’s World War II letters, and I realized today that I’ve typed up maybe 40% of the letter pages I have. (Whether to include photos or not will be another issue, and will probably depend on how easy Amazon has made that process—doing photos for The Weirld was kind of a pain.)

Anyway, at this point I think it’s clear that I do have a book here, and I will probably not excise huge portions of the letters. I was a little worried because my grandfather did tend to natter on about needing a wrench to fix his watch and some film, please, but assuming the remaining 60% of pages are like the initial 40%, the letters are actually pretty interesting. I didn’t realize this, but he was pretty close to some of the men who were leading the mad scramble to have medical men & supplies where you needed them when you needed them, which was no small task during World War II. (One surgical facility he was at went from 80 patients to 500 within a couple of weeks.) Even when he wasn’t in a leadership role, he was a close observer, and decisions to, say, not allow patients to stay in the hospital more than a few days before sending them on to a convalescent facility had a big impact on him.

So, I think this project is worth moving ahead on, and it’s nice to have clarity there. But I’m going to put my focus back on Trials for a bit, since I’m pretty close to it being ready for a beta read, and it would be nice to send it out. I’m a little concerned that I’ll be in production for both books one right after the other, but I’m not planning on doing a paper book of my grandfather’s letters, so it shouldn’t be too bad. (Famous last words….)

Quote of the day

Mo S. has just opened a can of kippered herring and a can of coffee and with some snitched bread and a little butter has served a snack to 11 of us in his room—10 x 12 + furniture. Mo is wearing very well—every ½ inch a soldier—and my spirits are much better now….

Quote of the day

Since my grandmother herself had been a nurse, my grandfather freely wrote about stuff like….

V.D. of course makes up a fair proportion of our work. We are very fortunate in have a Capt. H. (1st Lieut till a week ago) who is really interested in gonorrhea & lues [an archaic term for syphilis]. Lues now gets a 20 day crack of intensive therapy then a once a week for a spell and seem to be brought really under control—a great contribution I feel. Gonorrhea now gets treated in the units with the men on duty with sulfadiazine and if they don’t clear up they are hospitalized. Here they get a second course, then switch to sulfathiazole. If they still don’t clear up they are given fever therapy—wrapped up in blankets & rubber sheet & put under a light cradle. This brings the temp up to 105 in about 2 hours, then the lights are shut off and they are kept wrapped up for about 6-8 hours. This really cooks up the bugs & they mostly clear up in 24 hours.

He enjoyed the occasional visual aid.

As this Rx is rather rigorous & some people are temperamentally unsuited for it, a certain few can’t take fever therapy. These are given penicillin. This is given intramuscularly at the rate of 10,000 Oxford units every 1 hr for 10 hours. At the end of 5-6 hours the smears are negative and at the end of the Rx the discharge has stopped. Isn’t that something. We’ve been very fortunate in being able to have a certain amount of the stuff to work with. It is scarce and we feel very good about being able to put it on.

Quote of the day

From letter written by a friend, also in service, to my grandfather:

Thanks for your nice letter, but I’m sorry you’re so stretched that there’s no little chance of our getting together for an evening. If I had any excuse to go to North Ireland I’d take it, but I can’t think of any at the moment. It’s nice to hear of your children, hens, and dogs. I can’t return much along that line—at least as to hens & dogs, because we have no hens and no one tells me anything about Janke….

The war is getting very hard here. Our monthly liquor ration is to be cut out entirely, I hear, and there’ll only be a quart of scotch in the bar each night. How much more can we bear?

Children & hens

Quote of the day

Appropriate given how many people seem to be spending Memorial Day weekend….

Now that people have stoves in their tents and the wood is wet we do have a little trouble with people using lighter fluid to start their fires with. People just seem to have to learn the hard way that lighter fluid is very volatile.