In a message dated 11/11/2002 1:07:11 AM Mountain Standard Time, NJ-MEMORIES-D-request@rootsweb.com writes: > Now that I have opened a new topic for us to discuss,what childhood diseases > do you all remember having?They are memories,too,albeit not happy ones.I > picked holidays to be sick with most of mine...not smart! > That's funny . . . we were discussing just that at work today. One of the girls there said that she had every kind of measles in the book, plus all the other childhood diseases as well. I've had only two, and only one of those as a child. I caught the measles when I was in kindergarten, and it must have been around late January or early February, since I recall one of the kids in my class bringing me Valentine cards and cookies once I was out of quarantine. My mother actually sent me to school with the measles, even though she knew I was sick, because "Doris Jeanne hasn't missed any school yet, and she's not going to start now." Of course I got sent back home again, and she and my aunt had to carry me most of the way because I was too darned sick to walk. And, Kittie, since you know Nutley -- this was from Yantacaw School to the part of Highfield Lane that's east of Washington Avenue, just a block from the river, up that hill and down the other side. My other bout with a childhood disease was when I caught the chicken pox at age 23. I was lucky in that most people who catch kids' diseases as adults get really sick, but I went to work right through the whole thing because I never felt that terribly ill and I didn't know what that rash was. I even went out on a date with Bill (the great guy I married) with it; I didn't spot the rash until after he'd brought me home. Since people with chicken pox were quarantined when we were kids, and I didn't have any brothers or sisters to bring it home, either, I'd never seen that characteristic rash before. Now I can spot it a mile away. Incidentally, Bill came over the next day and took me for a walk and vacuumed my rug (which my roommate's dog had made a mess of), and it wasn't until I saw his driver's license a couple of months later that I found out that that had been his birthday. I still have a lot of resistance to viral infections; I've never in my life had the flu, and as a high-school senior, I passed the rubella to a bunch of girls without ever catching it myself. One evening I took a bunch of younger kids to Palisades Park; and after I'd driven them home, I went to a slumber party with a bunch of senior girls. The next day one of the boys from the Palisades Park trip called to tell me that he'd come down with rubella. A couple of weeks later every girl who had been at that slumber party came down with it -- in fact, at least one of them went to the prom with it! -- and I was the only possible source of the infection. Why I didn't catch it, I don't know. Doris in Colorado (Up2Nutrix@aol.com) "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." -- Jim Elliot, missionary and martyr