Allen Saxon

For years I thought my Aunt Bess’s encounter with Ty Cobb must have been the most memorable event of her nursing career ( Storied Stuff 6/22/20   https://www.storied-stuff.com/stories/saxon2). It wasn’t.

When she died at age 96 my cousin and I cleaned out her room in the home where she was living. While going through her things, we stumbled upon a now misplaced, brittle and yellowed news clipping from the 1930’s. It was a picture of a child sitting next to a doll that was a little bigger than the child’s foreleg. The accompanying story highlighted that this child was celebrating his first birthday, which was remarkable because he had only been the size of the doll when he was born prematurely.

 In the 1930’s there were no neonatal intensive care units, no sophisticated respiratory or nutritional care for such children. Preemies just died.

My cousin recounted for me how Aunt B. cared for this child. She fed him with an eye-dropper, even coming in on her days off. There were no incubators, so in order to keep him warm she carried him around in the pocket of an apron while she performed her other nursing duties.

( Imagine how that would go over with today’s Hospital Infection Control officers). Her fellow nurses warned her not to get emotionally attached since all these babies died.

What makes this story so memorable to me is not that the child celebrated his first birthday, but that he visited my aunt every year for the rest of his life--even after she had moved from Minnesota to Arizona. Until he passed away in his late seventies.