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The eighty-eight year old author chose this period of time in her life to write a memoir that necessitated her going back sixty-eight years to an event in 1944, a happening that burned a hole in her consciousness. In doing so, a fantastic host of memories were uncovered, memories long forgotten. The author had a nearly fatal accident where she broke her back among other injuries, in Woodstock, NY during July of 1944 at the very height of the horrific battles of World War II.

There was a significant lack of doctors, nurses and medical equipment, all of which were sent by the hospitals to aid the soldiers at the front. To be a patient in a hospital, during that time, was akin to falling into hell. And hell it was! Whatever the pain was, it had caused her to behave in ways not typical of her, and in retrospect she at times grew ashamed or incredulous at her own actions. She learned the full extent of what one suffered in a full body cast when urine seeped into it renting one’s skin, and what caused her to verge on wrapping a cord around her neck in exasperation of nurses not responding to her buzzer.

Anchored by an early forceful chapter describing her lying unbelievably perched on four mattresses with her head hanging down at a sharp angle so the blood was rushing dangerously into it; this was to take the place of the Bradford Frame, a device which had been sent to the hospitals for serious injuries of the spinal column. There is the humor of The Taming of the Shrew with the veritable witch who occupied her hospital room. This book plays against the odds of a dangerous edema; a dreaded spinal fusion; which the author fights and then accepts, and the general ignorance of a medically and psychologically deficient environment of 1944. There is the shock value of lying for months surrounded by the plaster world of the cast. The author sees a marvelous humor in all this frightening tragedy concocting a desperate hopeless romance with a Dr. MacNeil, who believes the twenty year old to be sixteen. She also envisions mind dancing, a marvelous device to escape from the hell! There is a fascinating interaction between the progress of World War II and its battles and the progress of her illness.

Read this absorbing memoir of the coming of age of a 20-year-old college student whose world suddenly changes in the summer of 1944. The work has pathos and humor and has an optimistic note. In reading it you will find it jolting and difficult to forget. In fact the author has never forgotten it for sixty-eight years.