I drove NC route 87 and other back roads from Fayetteville to Carrboro and Chapel Hill. Kate had lived at a small house on Hillview Street in Carrboro while she was attending graduate school at the School of Public Health of University of North Carolina in 1970-1971. She has not been back since that time. So I had promised that I would try to find the house and the school and take photos. I successfully found the house. The old structure has had a two story addition added to it since 1971. But the current residents still have a garden in the side yard at the same place where Kate had first planted one.
The School of Public Health used to be off by itself with some surrounding grassy lawns. That has all changed the School now has a bigger more modern office/classroom building that sits right on the road.
When I visited Kate in north Carolina in the spring 1971 she noted one morning that my eyes were yellow. So she drove me to the hospital. They immediately recognized that I had some form of hepatitis. They told me that I could not leave the building and put me into a quarantine room. They took blood and urine and all the hospital staff had to wear protective masks when they entered my room. At the time I did not have health insurance or any money to pay for a hospital stay or doctors or tests. I told them this, but they said that I had to be held in quarantine. That was on a Friday. Of course no staff were available to do the lab work over the weekend. And on Monday they said that the urine and blood samples had been lost so I would have to give them more. I was incensed. They were going to charge me for three days hospital stay with no work having been done on their part. I told them I was going to leave. They said I could not. They had me imprisoned in the hospital. I asked to see the hospital social worker and the person responsible for discharges. One or more doctors got involved as well. They told me that I was a public health risk since it was not yet clear what form of hepatitis I had or how communicable it might be. After I got really angry and insisted I was going to walk out, we finally came to an agreement that they would allow me to leave as long as I promised to get out of North Carolina within 24 hours. Which I did. This is my first trip back.
Looking back on that experience, it is clear that they were only concerned about public health in North Carolina. If I would take my potentially communicable hepatitis to some other state, that relieved them of what they thought was their responsibility.
I did leave and went back to my parents' home in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. There I went to the emergency room at Bryn Mawr hospital and was allowed to remain in my parents' home for 3-6 months of bed rest. My yellow eyes cleared up and eventually I was able to go on with my life.
The type of hepatitis I had was never diagnosed. I didn't do drugs, share needles, or participate in other activities often assoicated with hepatitis. A few months earlier, however, I had swum across the Nile River from the west bank in Luxor to the east bank to see the Valley of the Kings. A small group of travelers at the Youth Hostel in Luxor thought that would be a neat experience. Even though there were plenty of signs warning not to swim in the river, there were plenty of local kids having fun swimming along the bank of the river. The Nile is badly polluted and I am sure that I ingested some of its water during my swim.
All of this to explain why I took the following photos of the North Carolina Memorial Hospital on the UNC campus. All the buildings in the photo are new since I was "imprisoned" there.
I drove out of Chapel Hill in the afternoon on I-85 headed north. Just south of the Virginia border, I took US Route 158 to Littleton, NC.
Kate and I were very close friends with a couple who lived in Concord, NH for 9-10 years. In 1980 they moved to Princeton, NJ, and just a few years ago moved again to a beautiful lakefront home on Lake Gaston, a 30+ mile long flood control lake made by damming the Roanoke River. I arrived at their home before dusk and enjoyed a wonderful stay with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment