Today I'm recovering from a stomach virus, and my mind turned to a time in my youth when I'd had what we used to call "the flu." It was a gastrointestinal bug with fever. We referred to it as flu, and much later I was surprised to learn that influenza is a respiratory illness, not fever and vomiting.
In 1964 or '65 I was working at Sears, Roebuck & Co. on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta (now Ponce City Market, after a stint as City Hall East), my first full-time job, although I'd also worked there the summers after my Junior and Senior high school years. In the interim I went away to college but returned after one year to work my way through Georgia State College--and marry my boyfriend.
As I said, on the particular occasion I'm remembering, I'd been sick, and sometime during the first day after returning, I felt faint and dizzy. Did I lay my head down on my desk? Or maybe I told my supervisor I didn't feel well.
At any rate, in those days, Sears had a nurse who, as I remember, worked up on the top floor, and I was sent upstairs. I don't know what I expected, but what happened is that I was given a small cup of ammonia, not to sniff (as in smelling salts), but to drink.
This cured my faintness right away. It also cured me of any desire ever to return to see that nurse.
I have thought of this incident a number of times over the years, maybe even when I haven't been sick. Mercifully, in adulthood I've rarely had the stomach flu. I believe it's been ten years since the last time, but it hasn't been ten years since I thought of that ammonia.
Although I've always known immediately what it was that I drank, today I had a senior moment and couldn't say its name. I had to search for cues on the internet and ask my husband what I'd said when telling this story previously. I searched treatments for fainting, but no luck. Then, remembering it had something to do with refrigerants, I was searching under that, until my husband suggested ammonia. Bingo.
Here is the odd part. Although ammonia is used in smelling salts, nothing I could find showed an oral usage, and in fact ammonia is a poison. However, this U.S. National Library of Medicine site says you can be poisoned by breathing it or if you "if you swallow or touch products that contain very large amounts of ammonia." So I couldn't have been given straight ammonia. It packed a punch, though. And that smell!
I've been asking a few nurses I know, but they're only in their sixties and never heard of that usage of ammonia. Then I asked a doctor in the same age group whom I know casually. And he said he doesn't believe me. Just like a doctor. Make that just like a man.
I'm not coming up with anything about oral ammonia for fainting but find it hard to believe Sears had managed to employ some rogue Big Nurse. Hopefully I can trace down this practice, but I'll need to ask some nurses or doctors in their eighties. And from the south.
