I remember as a kid climbing the gentler mountains to go to my aunt’s farm from the train station at Valenii de Munte to visit mom’s sister Stella who lived in those mountains' lower valleys in the middle of nowhere.
I was small, my legs were tired, and I had whooping cough - everything tasted bitter that my aunt cooked for us and I was coughing so hard that my lungs and throat were burning - no cough syrup, no cough drops, just aspirin.
Whatever she served us, among them green peas and green juicy peppers, I still have disgust for those foods to this day. It was not her fault, of course, she was a good cook, but everything tasted bitter to me.
There was no medicine of any kind in pharmacies for my whooping cough, mom really tried to find some. The shelves were pretty bare - hoarders or black market profiteers picked up early whatever was delivered every day. Centralized economies run by the Communist Party were not efficient at all. There was never enough supply for the demand of twenty plus million people.
I must’ve been a tough cookie even back then. I survived the hike before I collapsed in her house, far away from any medical help. I don’t know what my mom was thinking! But I lived to tell the story. If only young people would listen to us and learn from our past!
If you wondered why we were not vaccinated, no whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine was available back then in the 1960s communist Romania even though the vaccine had been developed in the 1940s.
