My rescuing angel

The Spanish Flu has a personal meaning for me. As a kid I thrilled to my dad’s story of a childhood brush with death during the pandemic of 1918. He wrote up and published the story as part of his 1984 memoir Musings on Medicine.

My father Gordon Hunter Grant (1905-1987) was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, the third child of Ellen Ann McInnes and Gordon Cummings Grant. When Dad was little, the family migrated to Saskatchewan and took up farming, first in the Saskatoon area, and after 1911, outside Limerick.

Fortune was not kind to them. Their eldest child, who would have been my Uncle Norman, was trampled to death by a runaway team of horses in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He was just twelve years old.

The Grants had two more children; both died very young. I had the impression that the third death in the family, in July 1916, was seared into Dad’s soul:

    Morley, six years younger than I, was a victim of rheumatic fever, one of the great scourges of pre-antibiotic days. He was doomed from the start; his heart was hit by what I later came to know as pancarditis, meaning that the valves and the heart musculature were both hopelessly infected by the streptococcus.

    Doctor Gordon Ross, the physician who attended Morley, was unable to help the little boy; but the night before his little patient died, he sat in an arm chair close to the bed, comforting my parents the only way left to him, by his presence alone consoling the grief-stricken couple.

Dad said that he decided to become a doctor then. He was ten years old. His narrative embraces some happy times in Saskatchewan — he virtually grew up in the saddle. But the family decided to cut their losses and return to Ontario. Then a spell of terribly unseasonable weather paved the way for the fearsome second wave of Spanish Influenza that was rolling across Canada and through the world while the brutal climax of the Great War unfolded in Flanders and Germany.

    Our departure was delayed by the outbreak of the great influenza epidemic in the late autumn of 1918. That epidemic swept the prairie with the fury of the Black Death and my parents and I came very close to being numbered among its victims.

    Limerick was decimated. The only doctor was among the first to die; the only undertaker, who ran a furniture store, soon followed him to the little cemetery a mile or so out of the village. …

    Village and country people soon divided into two classes: those who had not caught the disease and stayed isolated at home to keep things that way, and those like my parents who worked from before dawn to well after dark to do what they could for their farm neighbours.

The family’s latest tribulation was shared by thousands across the Prairies who lived isolated on farms. Dad’s description of the extremities of the illness matches those of countless others.

    The week before Armistice Day, November 11, my parents came home, white, unsteady on their feet and barely able to speak. My father whispered to me to stable and feed the team. When I came back to the house they had managed to crawl to bed and could only shake their heads when I carried up my usual cuisine which consisted of fried eggs and mashed potatoes.

    For four days I fought it out, apparently unscathed, but on the morning of the fifth day I could barely creep downstairs. I had to let the stock go unfed and managed only to crank the rural telephone and croak out our plight to the only “Central” who was minding the switchboard beside her bed. It was well below zero outdoors. I barely managed to stoke the two stoves before I crawled upstairs to bed.

Fade to black and the Long Sleep? Almost — Dad and his family were nursed past the point of danger by a young woman who in his oral account was a sex worker. Her care made all the difference.

    Our lives were saved by an eighteen year old girl to whom my mother had been kind when she badly needed kindness. She arrived about noon, riding a farm horse. After stoking the dying fires, she fed the stock and settled down to her around-the-clock vigil of mercy, one she had carried out in many a stricken household. My parents were slowly gaining on their illnesses. About six days after the onset of mine, the girl reluctantly had to get them up, one at a time, to say their goodbyes to me. I barely recall her early presence. I was in either coma or in delirium through the week. I obviously had a classic case of the deadly lobar pneumonia that killed so many people in the epidemic.

    I woke the morning after my parents had been to my bedside. I was drenched with sweat and able to swallow a little milk under the girl’s urging. My incredulous parents apparently gained rapidly after that, but I was a long time getting on my feet.

Dad was able to track the fortunes and fate of their caregiver:

    Our rescuing angel astonishingly survived the epidemic without even a minor case of the flu, although she seems to have gone some six weeks with almost no sleep and working at a pace well calculated to kill by itself. She married a young Norwegian farmer whose wife had died. She bore him twin sons; they were killed in the same bombing raid over the Seine in late 1944. She died in 1946 of cancer, having barely reached middle age.

Thanks to that rescuing angel, Dad went on to matriculate at the Owen Sound Collegiate Institute and study medicine at the University of Toronto. He graduated M.D. in the class of 1929 and did his internship and residency at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City.

After the war the young family moved to Victoria, settled in pleasant suburban Oak Bay and, in 1948, added little me.

Dad became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (F.R.C.S.) that same year, I think. One of the longest chapters in Musings on Medicine concerns his training in surgery of the hand with Dr. Stirling Bunnell in San Francisco. In the 1960s, Dad was Chief of Staff at Royal Jubilee Hospital. He served as President of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand for two years. I used to meet people (not so much any more) who gratefully remembered his care, typically in repairing an injured or impaired hand. Power lawn mowers and rheumatoid arthritis loomed large in his practise. In later years, Dad taught the surgery of repair to young medical practitioners in Nigeria, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“From 1970 to his retirement,” reads a note to Mum from a former patient, “He was my surgeon, my friend and guide through six operations. I never use my hands without thinking of him. I am a living testimonial to the skill of a great and compassionate man. He used his knowledge to save my hands. His wisdom gave me courage and strength to survive a succession of trials.”

A dentist in Vancouver wrote: “As a young boy of fifteen years, in 1945, my right hand was badly damaged in an accident, and I spent three months in St Joseph’s Hospital. After initial healing and treatment our family physician Dr. Sinclair called upon Dr. Grant to see if he could rebuild my right hand, in particular the first three fingers. Through his consummate skill and understanding he fully succeeded after many operations, the last of which was in 1953. I graduated from the University of Washington in 1948 as a dentist and have been in private practice these last 29 years. My hands are important to me. I have been eternally grateful to him these many years and will always remember him as a most kind and gentle caring person.”

“I shall never forget,” wrote Bruce Hutchison, a family friend, “Our good times together, nor the skilled services he rendered to my family in time of trouble. In yours, be assured that Gordon’s life was a magnificent success as his countless beneficiaries can testify.”

All that surgery of repair might never have happened. I might not have happened. The Spanish Flu killed an estimated 50,000 Canadians. Dad could have been just another statistic.

I appreciate that Dad’s rescuing angel was mine too.

I hear in the story of the rescuing angel echoes of the graveyard scene in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. From a vastly different premise comes a similar conclusion. George Bailey (James Stewart) is granted his despairing wish by an angel-in-training named Clarence (Henry Travers). He wishes not to have been born. Clarence shows George the world without him in a town made infinitely worse by his absence. George discovers the grave of his brother Harry. The movie began with a scene from their childhood; George had saved Harry’s life. Up to this moment, George was certain his brother had recently rescued a shipload of troops. The angel recites the sad news: “Your brother Harry Bailey broke through the ice and was drowned at the age of nine.” “That’s a lie!” George retorts, “Harry Bailey went to war! He got the Congressional Medal of Honor! He saved the lives of every man on that transport!” Clarence: “Every man on that transport died. Harry wasn’t there to save them because you weren’t there to save Harry.” The scene may be viewed on YouTube.

This work on Spanish Influenza in Victoria, Canada, 1918-1920 is dedicated to that young woman in Limerick, Saskatchewan, a saver of young life and lives unbegun. Thank you.

This work is dedicated to all caregivers who volunteered to keep vigil over those attacked by the Spanish flu. Some of them perished of it, as did Victoria schoolteacher-turned-caregiver Beulah Westwood at the age of thirty. From studying the Great Pandemic we learn that Medical Science was all but helpless before the influenza virus-bacterium complex. The key to recovery was Nursing. The caregivers were brave soldiers in the trenches of that other, long-forgotten war. So many gave their lives.

Published March 26, 2018. Last revision February 4, 2022.