Two weeks shy of my 50th birthday, I learned a key piece of information that would have been REALLY beneficial to know in my youth. I will now share this with you. You’re welcome.
Your Temperature
For those of you who are about my age (1971 vintage), you know that taking your temperature as a kid was a different kind of experience than it is today. Modern instrumentation allows us to swipe a device across our forehead for about one second and it shows your body temperature. Clever.
Before that, you put something in your ear for about five seconds to measure your temperature. In fact, this is still the tech we have at our house.
But before that great leap in technology, we used mercury thermometers, the glass tube kind.
Glass mercury thermometers are old school.1 Not just because of the technology – because of the placement. If you are old enough to have had your temperature taken by a mercury thermometer, you already know where this story is going. For my younger audience, a brief moment of enlightenment…
Measurement Accuracy
To get an accurate reading from a mercury thermometer, we were told there were only a few medically acceptable places to put it:
(1) Under your arm – least accurate;
(2) Under your tongue – better;
(3) “Just relax” – the most accurate.
I kid you not.
As if it was so important to measure to the tenth of a degree.
“How high was his temperature?”
“103.4”
“Oh wow! He really is sick. Poor guy probably feels awful.”
As if “103-ish” wouldn’t suffice to ascertain2 the poor chap was miserable.
Maybe we could have just put a hand on his forehead and felt the radiant heat as he simultaneously sweated and shivered from the chills.3
Or maybe just look at him and think, “Wow. You look awful. You’re probably sick.”
Nope. All that is not good enough. We apparently needed precise body temperature readings.
Everyone over 45 years old carries some residual psychological scarring from taking their temperature “accurately”, a trauma quietly shared across multiple generations from this unnatural act.4
Placement Selection
When my brother and I were sick, mom, a registered nurse, gave us the choice between the two most exacting measurement techniques. The armpit methodology was apparently deemed of “insufficient measurement accuracy”.
Given the choice, well, UNDER MY TONGUE seems like the most obvious answer, right?
Not so fast.
We really need to think through the logic carefully here as the full ramifications might be more, shall we say, far-reaching. Of utmost importance to consider:
Which method did my older brother (Matt) choose the last time he was sick?
This is critical information, and ultimately, the determining factor in this decision. Since I could not know this most critical piece of data with certainty, I had to make the only safe assumption… the worst-case scenario. Which meant, under my tongue, was out of the question. Clearly.
But wouldn’t Matt have chosen under the tongue? Perhaps not, if he had considered what I might have decided the time before that. This was pure game theory, sibling edition, and I wasn’t risking the idea that Matt failed risk assessment, mitigation, and high-stakes adversarial modeling the last time he was sick.
This is precisely the thought process that went through my 9-year-old brain during the few seconds I had to make this life-altering decision.
“Yeah, let’s do it the most accurate way, I guess.”
If Matt later decides to put it in his mouth when he is sick, even better. This final thought further reinforced my decision, giving me full confidence I was making the right call.
This is truly emblematic of what it means to grow up and make adult-level decisions.
DEFCON 2.
Fast Forward to Adulthood
Christmas 2020. I was relaying this humorous growing-up story to the extended family in mom’s living room when mom interrupted and said,
“We had two thermometers.”
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah, one for each method. They were color coded. Pink for your mouth. Yellow for your bottom.”
Pause. [processing…]
Longer pause. [eyes squint…]
“So, I… uhh…”
“I didn’t have to… uhh…” [lightbulb moment]
“Mom!!! That would have been nice to know 40 years ago!”
“I thought you knew.”
“Nope.”
And this is much of life, isn’t it? We make what we think are intelligent, well-thought-out, logical decisions with imperfect information. For a youngster, this experience represented rational decision-making, but faulty initial boundary conditions diminished the utility of the model.
Sometimes we carry similar frameworks into adulthood with outdated assumptions that no longer serve us.
Regardless, sometimes, we just need to decide on a direction and hope for the best.
Sometimes it works out beautifully.
Other times… well, you know… you end up with a thermometer story… but at least you’ll know your temperature with great accuracy.5
[Tell me in the comments that I’m not the only one with this story.]
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FOOTNOTES:
- The mercury thermometer was invented in 1714 by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. Correct, the same guy that invented a temperature scale with the super-convenient-and-easy-to-remember freezing and boiling points of 32 and 212, respectively. Good luck kids.
- Incidentally, the word “ascertain” is a derivative of “ass-certain”, related to taking one’s body temperature years ago.
- I might have made up the factoid on the previous footnote. Tell me you didn’t believe that.
- Although, I am told this is not as traumatic as the alien abduction experience.
- Laughing at our younger selves provides clarity on how seriously we take things today that might one day look equally absurd. Unfortunately, clarity often arrives from a distanced perspective, and surfaces only as a whisper of wisdom, illuminating the assumptions from our youth that should have been provisional.
For clarification, the thermometers (there really were 2) were not color coded. They looked exactly the same except for the beginning point. The oral one had a straight line origin while the rectal one had a small bulb. (The one pictured in the blog would be an oral one.) For further clarification, because your juvenile brain couldn’t seem to think of this…those thermometers were thoroughly cleaned with 3 (yep, count them) alcohol soaked swabs. The time between uses would have taken care of the germs anyway, but mom being a nurse….
I am always amazed at the stories coming from now grown sons. I am fairly certain no girl would have ever picked the thermometer based on what a sibling might or might not have chosen before.
And, as always, good blog, son.
That was not comforting… 🙂