Elizabeth Payne, December 23, 2010 The landmarks are familiar -- there's Billings Bridge, Carling Avenue and Immaculata High School, among other places. It almost sounds like the Ottawa you know. But it isn't. The city Clara Raina Flannigan and her sister Anne Raina describe in the newly released book Clara's Rib could be on another planet.
This is an Ottawa before antibiotics, when death was a familiar visitor to families and when tuberculosis lurked in the shadows. When it struck, as it did frequently, it changed everything.
Clara Raina Flannigan virtually grew up in the Royal Ottawa Sanatorium on Carling Avenue -- now the site of the city's main mental health facility, the Royal Ottawa Hospital, where people are treated for other ailments that can't always be cured. She spent her childhood battling tuberculosis, for which, at the time, there was no cure, only treatment of rest, fresh air and, medieval-sounding surgeries. She entered the Sanatorium in 1939 when she was just 12 and, except for brief periods at home, stayed there for more than a dozen years, enduring painful operations -- including the removal of ribs -- loneliness, and the death of friends and family members, including two brothers and her father, as well as her fiance. Other family members were also infected and spent time away from home receiving treatment.
Growing up in the sanatorium meant Clara couldn't attend school, something she longed to do. That was not all she missed. Her first glance of her baby sister Anne was through the window of her hospital room.
Her life during those years was recorded in a series of letters home to her family, as well as diaries and a manuscript, that, before Clara's death in 1998, Anne promised her sister she would some day have published. They reveal a humour and determination that must have helped her survive the ordeal and go on to live a productive and happy life, but also the bleakness of her situation at a time when the death rate from tuberculosis was in the range of 40 per cent.
"Father Latendresse brought Holy Communion and I certainly welcomed the comfort of religion today," she wrote on Jan. 5, 1946 as she, once again, left home to go to the sanatorium for treatment. "As I walked out the door I wondered if I would ever again be coming home to stay. So many of the girls with whom I am in the San are now dead. However, I am trying to think of brighter things and am very thankful for the six wonderful months I had at home."
Today we live in a world in which the death of a child from the flu is enough to create a panic, as happened last year during the H1N1 outbreak, when people flooded vaccine clinics. Reading Clara's Rib is a lesson in how lucky we are -- or most of us, at least.
We have vaccines to prevent the kinds of childhood diseases from which generations have suffered. We have antibiotics to treat serious and even not-so-serious infections to prevent them from turning deadly. And, until recently, the word tuberculosis was a dusty relic of another era.
"When I was a child, if someone had asked me what tuberculosis was, I would have had to stop and really think about my answer because it was simply the way life was," Anne Raina wrote in the postscript to her sister's book. "However, if pressed, I would likely have responded that it was the disease that took most of my brothers and sisters and father to a big hospital and that I could hardly ever get to see them."
"I always took the attitude," she wrote, "that I could handle anything, and next to TB, nothing really counted."
Clara's Rib is a lesson in perseverance and acceptance. It is, incongruously, a story with a happy ending. Despite her health challenges, Clara eventually has a family and lives into her seventies. It is also a reminder of how far we have come from the days when TB stalked this city.
But the book should also sound a warning about the reemergence of tuberculosis.
While it remains relatively rare and, mostly, treatable in Canada's affluent south, there is growing concern about cases of drug resistant tuberculosis around the world.
And in Canada's Far North, tuberculosis remains a modern, and growing, plague. Canadian Inuit are 185 times as likely to contract tuberculosis as others born in Canada, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. And the same kinds of problems that made people in Ottawa vulnerable to the disease when Clara was being treated in the 1930s and '40s, are playing a role in its deadly resurgence in the North -- overcrowding, poor housing construction, poor nutrition and poverty among them.
Clara's Rib is a touching historical read, but also a reminder of why we must not lose sight of the dangers of diseases such as TB.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/When+death+stalked+Ottawa/4017296/story.html
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