Tags
1960's style, Blalock, entertainement, Lana Del Ray, Mad Men, nearsightedness, retro hair, tetralogy of fallot, Tussing
In the past month, I have become somewhat obsessed with the television series, Mad Men. Recently, I have watched more of this show than I have blogged. I have found myself becoming completely wrapped up in the time period the show was set in, late 1950’s, early 1960’s. The clothes. The hair. The over-all style of the show has become something I am striving to slip into my life anywhere I can get away with it.
For example, I want a retro hairstyle. I’m thinking something like this…
Maybe not exactly Mad Men hair, but still retro and something I could see for myself.
Anyways, I have caught myself thinking many times lately, “I really wish I had lived back then.” I have this thought for a variety of reasons. I would love to wear a dress, gloves, and pearls everyday. I think I would have loved to live in a time when women were expected to stay home all day with the children, but still had “help” to do all the cooking, cleaning, and baby raising. I think it would be neat to live in such a prosperous time for America and I cannot imagine what change that generation has been able to witness.
But then I remember my nearsightedness. The truth is, if I do not have my contacts in I really do not think I could see well enough not to walk into walls. I am not sure about this, but I do not think contact lenses were invented in 1962. My options in life would have either been…
thick-lensed cat-eye glasses or…
see the world as blurry as the guy in the background.
What would my life be like without contact lenses?
After I am done silently thanking whoever the person is that invented contacts, I remember that if I had lived in this time period, I really wouldn’t have to worry about how well I see, because I wouldn’t have survived past 2.
I was born with a congenital heart defect called tetralogy of Fallot. I haven’t blogged much about this, maybe I will in the future, but I am completely fine now. But I did have to have a series of 2 open-heart surgeries to correct the defects. Without these surgeries, I would have died.
The first successful total repair surgery for tetralogy of Fallot was performed in 1954, but the surgery was not considered routinely successful until the early 1980s.
Thank God for medicine, thank God for the practice of surgery, thank God for men and women who continue to advance these fields, thank God for Alfred Blalock, Helen B. Taussig, Vivien Thomas, and C. Walton Lillehei, thank God for whoever invented contact lenses, and thank God that I was born after the invention of such wonderful things!