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The Room of Pain and Loneliness continued
Tom was sent to The Room too many times to count. Perhaps that’s why he remembers The Room so clearly – because 5-year-old children do fuss and cry – especially "crippled" children with newly broken bones, rehabilitating from polio. Tom spent what seemed to him like years isolated in that sterile closet.
If Tom didn’t obey, if he wasn’t quiet, the casters would be unlocked on the hospital bed and he’d be wheeled into The Room. Wheeled into the Room to contemplate his incorrect behavior. He remembers he was always made to feel he’d done something bad.
But he didn’t know how to meet the Home’s expectations of what "being good" was.
"God – then I was in that room, how I prayed I could go to sleep so the time would past faster! But I couldn’t sleep," he now says. "No one seemed to care that I was lonely or in pain. I’d call – cry – for my mother. But nobody came.
"I couldn’t express myself to anyone. Of all this, the whole experience at D.T. Watson, what I remember most is the loneliness."
Tom did learn, during the two years he was to spend at D.T. Watson, how to limit the time spent in The Room. He simply learned to obey the "don’t fuss, don’t cry" rules. Regardless of the pain, wants or needs.
D.T. Watson, he says, was an expensive convalescent home – "for rich kids." He was able to stay there only through money from The March of Dimes.
His body was tended to, after a fashion – and he was fed. But one could scarcely say he was "cared for." To this day he cannot remember a smile, or even a friendly face, except on weekends during visiting hours, when stern, forbidding faces turned warm and caring – at least until parents went home.