Documentary on One Podcast6 Jan 2021

Perfume From America

Peggy O'Connell's strange isolation was something resembling quarantine. Peggy, a elderly woman from Cavan, combines her half-century-old memories with extracts from her diary to tell a vivid, sometimes painful, more often amusing story of seven years with tuberculosis (TB).

The garden shed was only the culmination of a strange period of tough treatments and a form of social alienation that was sometimes as bad as being a patient in Sir Patrick Dunn's hospital. "All my teenager years I had to watch my sister going out." Even then, the name of her illness was rarely spoken, TB being firmly associated with dirt and poverty.

Eventually, "the doctor just wrote me off", and Peggy was sent home to die. This was 1949, and it was time for the bed in the garden shed. Then her boyfriend, Harry, saw an article in Reader's Digest about streptomycin. The wonder drug wasn't available in Ireland, but with the help of her father's friends in the post office, he managed to get Peggy a package of "perfume from America" - past the customs inspectors and into her bloodstream.

The drug, streptomycin, was to be administered by injection, and Peggy's diary reflects the stoic stiff-upper-lip with which she and the family faced the ordeal.

Peggy remembers this period in her life, in particular her time living in a garden shed, in vivid detail.

Produced by Ann Walsh.

First broadcast March 2001 on RTÉ Radio 1.

An Irish radio documentary from RTÉ Radio 1, Ireland - Documentary on One - the home of Irish radio documentaries

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