Eunice C. Smith

I think the anesthesia must have affected my ability to write. I just can't seem to marshall my thoughts into any coherent order anymore, and when I finally do, the words are all wrong, pompous and arch and full of too many syllables. Maybe that has nothing to do with the anesthesia still congealed in my already overtaxed liver and everything to do with the last 5 weeks spent listening to Georgette Heyer novels being read aloud by plummy British voices. Three days before surgery a set of CDS with all 43 of Ms. Heyer's works came in the mail from the UK and I spent many subsequent hours cramming the iPod full, so that when I got home I would only have to sit up, switch on, and start knitting. (Many thanks, by the way, to my great brother Bob, who supplied me with the critical grape Popsicles during those first few days back in my own domicile.) (See what I mean? I can't even say house now, it has to be a domicile!) For those of you who aren't familiar with Georgette Heyer, she wrote Regency Romances (à la Jane Austen) and mysteries from the 20s till the late 50s. My grandmother used to force feed these to me, and I accredit her work with my high verbal SATs. She's still my comfort reading — or listening — of choice.

But this post is supposedly about Eunice C. Smith (1875-1955), not Georgette Heyer. When (if?) my ability to write returns, I plan on authoring a children's book called Escape from Fairy Godmother School, and so have been keeping an eye out for likely teachers therein. I visualize someone just like Miss Eunice Smith as the headmistress. The wonderful picture of her at top hangs in the lobby of Alton Memorial Hospital, which she and her sister donated the grounds and funds for in 1936. Miss Eunice's father, William Eliot Smith, ran Illinois Glass in Alton (see bottom pic of an array of the company's 1906 bottle shape offerings), and was rich, rich, rich. I'm sure that hat in the photo came all the way from Paris, France. But Miss Eunice was no lazy Lady of Leisure: she was an avid bird-watcher, equestrienne (that's her riding habit from 1910 at the Alton Museum of History and Art), and general mover and shaker. The nurses at Alton Memorial say she still makes her presence known there, and I definitely felt it myself. After I pushed the Fentanyl pain management pump button a million times due to the agony caused by seaweed-salad-&-gut-poking-induced "innard inflation", I got the itchies, which is a common Fentanyl side effect. For itching they give Benadryl, an over-the-counter drug I'd never taken. My nurse gave me a whopping 50 mg. dose of it IV and I immediately thought I was dying for real. I'm not going to rag on the staff for their feeble reaction to my crisis, though I had post-traumatic flashbacks of those next 15 minutes for a couple of weeks. Let's just say I passed my stress test, am now officially tagged as "Allergic to Benadryl", and may well have been saved from the other side by the lingering good energy of Miss Eunice C. Smith!