Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hi everyone, this is Dawn Klem and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:08] Today I'm going to tell you a story of fate.
[00:00:15] It's kind of fate. I'll let you figure that out for your own, I guess.
[00:00:21] But when I was 18 years old, I graduated from high school when I was 17, and I think I told you in previous episodes, if you've been following me along, that I really didn't have any direction on where I was going to be going with my life. And so I decided to take a year off to work and make money in case I did decide to go to college, which eventually I did.
[00:00:48] So that first year I got a job as a full time waitress at a restaurant just outside of town called the old 99.
[00:00:58] And it was a great job. I don't mind being a waitress at all. It's a lot of fun talking to people.
[00:01:06] It it. I'm an extrovert, in case you couldn't tell.
[00:01:11] And so it was a lot of fun for me to wait on the local people from around our area and get to know people. I made a lot of money while I was working there, which was great. The tips were incredible. Everyone was very generous there.
[00:01:29] Sometimes I would open the restaurant up and if I opened the restaurant, I would start, I would have to be at the restaurant by 6 o' clock in the morning, start the coffee, get the hot water going and open the doors and make sure everything was set up before the cooks got in and the rest of the staff started trickling in.
[00:01:54] And during that time, a lot of times before the coffee was even percolated, a lot of the old farmers or men that were getting ready to go to an early job would come in for their morning cup of coffee and they would sit at the counter and talk to me the whole time while I was getting everything ready for the day.
[00:02:17] And that was a lot, a lot of fun. I think it was during the time when maybe a cup of coffee might have cost 50 cents, 35 to 50 cents for a cup of coffee, with free refills of course, and they would still give me a quarter tip. I remember thinking, that's so awesome. You know, I'm getting like a 50% tip from them for a cup of coffee and how hard is it to pour a cup of coffee, right?
[00:02:46] So I opened the restaurant a lot of times and then there were times when I closed the restaurant. The restaurant would close usually at 10 o' clock during the week and I think 11 o' clock on the weekends. So if you close the restaurant, then it was up to you to help, like, clean the bathrooms, mop the floor, spray down the countertops, make sure all the tables were cleaned up, make sure all the dishes had made it back to the kitchen. Kitchen. We had a big dishwasher back there and just get everything put away neat and tidy. We had a. Like, a nicer dining room, and then we had booths in a linoleum floor out in the front. In the nicer dining room, it was carpet. So, of course, we're vacuuming and making sure everything was buffed and puffed, dusted down and looked great for the next day.
[00:03:43] It was a lot of fun because you worked as a team with everybody, and everyone managed to get along really, really well there. It was almost like a family atmosphere. It was owned by a husband and his wife, and their son helped run it. Randy.
[00:04:02] She was a tough cookie, though. She was a tough cookie, and she expected the restaurant to be stuck spotless. And she would let you know if you missed something.
[00:04:15] She actually really liked me. She knew my dad, and she knew my Uncle Bob, my dad's brother, really, really well.
[00:04:22] So that made it a little easier for me. But I was a hard worker anyway. I don't mind hard work. I actually enjoy working.
[00:04:31] I think I'm like my dad. I'm a little bit of a workaholic.
[00:04:35] It's been a challenge for me to be retired, so.
[00:04:40] But. But it was a good job. It was a great job.
[00:04:46] Well, it was in the fall, and I'd probably been working there for six months maybe, and it was my day off.
[00:04:56] On my day off, we would always go to cold water, to McDonald's. I know this sounds so ridiculous, but we didn't have a McDonald's in Hillsdale, so it was a lot of fun. First of all, that we were driving, you know, 2012 miles away to another town to go to a McDonald's, and we were all excited about having a McDonald's around.
[00:05:20] The burger joint that we had in Hillsdale that most of us kids went to was called the Burger Aisle. And we did spend a lot of time there, there's no doubt. But it was the newness of having a McDonald's in the vicinity that drew us there. And I think it was also partly the drive to. To. So we were getting out of town. It was like a big escape.
[00:05:43] So my friends and I all drove over to McDonald's. I'll never forget it, because it was the first time I ever ate a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Up until then, I was a Big Mac girl.
[00:05:59] I like the sauce. I'm a saucy girl. So that kind of goes hand in hand. But that day I said, okay, I'm gonna stretch myself. I'm going to eat a Quarter Pounder with chicken cheese.
[00:06:11] So that was good.
[00:06:13] We get back and then we're, you know, all just hanging out, talking, laughing. It's my day off.
[00:06:22] And for dinner, we decide we're gonna go get a pizza at Sammy's Pizzeria. Sammy's Pizzeria was another favorite hangout for all the kids in town.
[00:06:34] It was owned by a Hispanic couple, Margin Cruz, and their son.
[00:06:42] Their nephew, actually. Sorry about that. Their nephew Simplicio, was actually in my class.
[00:06:49] So all of us loved going there because it was like a family event.
[00:06:54] We loved that family so much.
[00:06:57] And actually, one of the best parts about it is we all work there. So when we went there, they would always give us a discount on the pizza.
[00:07:06] So as you can see, 18 years old, I got a pretty good diet going, right? A Quarter Pounder with cheese for lunch and a pizza for dinner.
[00:07:18] That's so funny when I look back on it.
[00:07:21] So probably about an hour after I ate, I started to get a belly ache.
[00:07:28] I was not feeling very well. I thought, what could that possibly be? I didn't think of food poisoning at all, because at Sammy's Pizzeria, that was another place I worked at part time, and that place was spotless. I mean, all of us that work there knew how to clean. That is one thing that they taught us. The stainless steel was perfectly shiny clean by the time we closed the pizzeria down every night.
[00:08:01] So I wasn't worried about it being the pizza. I thought, well, maybe it could be that Quarter Pounder with cheese. I've never had a Quarter pounder with cheese before.
[00:08:11] I just was not feeling well. I didn't know if I was gonna have an episode of vomiting.
[00:08:19] But all of a sudden, when I was trying to stand up, I couldn't stand up without having the severe pain in my abdomen. I remember my friends are driving me home to let my mom know that I'm sick. And I get in the house and I couldn't even stand up straight. I go, I am in so much pain. I think I'm going to have to go to the emergency room. My mom's like, what?
[00:08:46] I mean, I was never sick. I was rarely sick as a kid.
[00:08:51] She. She was like, are you sure? I said, mom, I am in so much pain, I can't even stand up straight. I am in agony You've got to take me to the emergency room.
[00:09:04] So she says, okay, hop in the car. Let's get going. I laid down on the backseat, and my dad drove her and myself in.
[00:09:14] We got to the emergency room, and I could barely walk in the door. I was in agony.
[00:09:21] So they put me in one of the back bays, and the doctor came in and he says, I don't know, you might have appendicitis. I said, what?
[00:09:31] Really? He said, yeah, I think. I'm thinking you might have appendicitis. I'm gonna do a complete blood count on you, and we'll see what your white blood cell count looks like.
[00:09:44] So, sure enough, he comes back, you know, 20 minutes later, your white count is really elevated.
[00:09:50] We're gonna do an X ray on you to see, but I think you're gonna be going to emergency surgery.
[00:09:57] I was like, oh, no.
[00:10:00] But honestly, I was in so much pain. They could have given me a shot and put me out of my misery right then, and it would have been perfectly fine with me. I was in complete agony.
[00:10:15] So, long story short, they end up taking me to the emergency room to emergency surgery, and I end up having my appendix out that night.
[00:10:27] Well, I was sicker than a dog.
[00:10:31] Between the Quarter Pounder with cheese and the pizza, I was up vomiting all night long.
[00:10:40] All that junk food all night.
[00:10:45] Literally all night. And I was the most miserable human. And you can just imagine because the. They've cut into my lower abdomen, and every time I use those muscles to vomit, I was in so much pain. I remember just thinking, oh, please, just put me out of my misery right now. I'm ready to go. God, I can't take another minute of this.
[00:11:12] It was absolutely the worst thing.
[00:11:17] By the morning, I was starting to feel a little better. But I can't say I was in any shape to ever be discharged from the hospital at that point.
[00:11:27] Well, in the meantime, my friend in my grade and one of my dearest friends to this day, Judy, had gotten admitted that night as well, and she got admitted for gastritis. She didn't have appendicitis, but she definitely had an inflamed stomach, and she was in agony herself.
[00:11:50] She found out that I was in the hospital, so she begged the head nurse for the two of us to be put together in this same room. We were. We were quite a matched set, let me just say. Here I am vomiting and I'm in agony, and then she's over there in so much pain from her gastritis, getting IV fluids. I was Getting IV fluids.
[00:12:14] I mean, it was awful. It was one of the most awful nights I've ever spent in my life. And it's not something that I'm ever going to forget, believe me. The fact that I can relay the story to this day is. Tells you how much pain I was in.
[00:12:32] Well, my mom called the 99 Restaurant to let him know that I had had to have an emergency appendectomy and that I wasn't going to be able to go back to work for at least two weeks.
[00:12:47] And they were so gracious about it. They were wonderful.
[00:12:51] And I ended up staying in the hospital. I think we were in both in there about three or four days. She ended up staying, I think, a day longer than me.
[00:12:59] Then I got to go home. But before I got to go home, the owner of the restaurant came to see me with her son, which was so nice. I was really, really happy to see her.
[00:13:12] She came in to see how I was doing, and the very first thing she said to me is, how did you like the plant that we sent you?
[00:13:24] And there was like dead silence for a couple of minutes. And then I looked at her and I go, what plant?
[00:13:31] She said, what do you mean, what plant?
[00:13:34] I said, I didn't receive anything from the 99. I'm sorry. I wish I did, but I didn't. And she was like, okay. Never said another word to me about it.
[00:13:50] So get ready to go home. I get discharged to home, and I'm recovering at home, and I can't go back to work for another 10 days because they don't want me lifting heavy trays of food for when I delivered the food to everybody's table, they said, you're not going to be doing any heavy lifting for a while. We're going to keep you out of work for at least two weeks, and then we'll see how it goes from there.
[00:14:24] So I was like, okay, I guess so. I wasn't really doing, you know, I wasn't setting any speed limits around the house, I can tell you that.
[00:14:35] Still having a hard time standing up straight. But now it was because I had the stitches so tight in my groin, I could hardly even stand up straight.
[00:14:45] And I was just taking my time recovering. I was not eating that much yet, and I really, really, really was not feeling that well at all.
[00:14:56] So probably about three days at home, I get a ring on the doorbell because my parents are both working. So I'm at home by myself recovering, and I answer the door, and there is the cook from work staring at me. And she's got a big African violet plant that's just another thing that I'll never forget.
[00:15:25] And she said, I came to bring your flowers. This is from everybody at work. We all really miss you a lot, and we really hope that you'll be back to work soon. Work just isn't the same without your smiling face.
[00:15:40] And I was like, thank you. That's so nice of you to come all the way over here to deliver my flowers. And she's like, no problem. No problem at all, Dawn. Talk to her for a few minutes, and then she's on her merry way. My mom came home, I showed her the African violet, and she thought it was really, really beautiful in a beautiful pot. And we talked about how nice they were to me at the restaurant and how lucky I was to have such a good job, which. All of which I agreed to.
[00:16:12] Okay, so finally, after, oh, probably two. Two weeks, I think two to three weeks, they said I could go back to work. Limited lifting, but I should be able to at least take orders and just do small lifting. Maybe not do the big tables where there were more than five people, but I should be good enough to go back to work.
[00:16:39] So I went back to work, and the owner of the restaurant came up to me, and she said, did you ever get your flowers? I said, yes. Oh, my gosh. The cook came and delivered them directly to me at home.
[00:16:55] Wasn't that so nice? She goes, it better be nice.
[00:16:58] What do you mean? She said, I found out we had taken a big collection, and after I went to see you in the hospital, I found out that she had kept the money and had no intention of ever even buying you the flowers. I almost fired her for it, but she said she would make it up by buying you flowers and delivering them directly to your home. And I was like, oh, my word, really? And she said, yes, that is exactly what happened.
[00:17:29] So I'm happy to know that she did deliver them to you and that we're all good. You got the flowers that you deserved, and we're so happy to have you back at work.
[00:17:42] At first I thought, oh, this is kind of uncomfortable. Am I going to be able to look the cook directly in the eye anymore, knowing the story?
[00:17:52] But then I'm like, nah, who cares? I'm young. I bounce back. She delivered the flowers. There's nothing more to really think about.
[00:18:03] I was in the hospital. I got to share a room with my. One of my best friends. We were both miserable, but we were miserable together.
[00:18:12] Life isn't that bad. Dawn Life really isn't that bad.
[00:18:18] But there is one lesson that I did learn from this whole thing, and that was, I'm never going to eat a Quarter Pounder with cheese again. So I ate a Quarter Pounder with cheese when I was 18, and honest to God, I never, ever ate a Quarter Pounder with cheese again. I couldn't even look at them. Every time I would look at them, I thought I was going to start dry heaving. That's how sick I was that night.
[00:18:54] And one time I was working as a director up in Mercy Hospital in Muskegon, and we had a Critical Access Hospital up in Shelby.
[00:19:08] So I was supposed to go up and do some education at the Critical Access Hospital.
[00:19:15] And I decided on my way home from doing the training up there that I was going to stop at a local McDonald's.
[00:19:24] So I get to the McDonald's and I didn't really want a Big Mac. I didn't want all that bread. I decided, oh, you know what? I'm going to try a Quarter Pounder with cheese.
[00:19:37] So by Now, I am 55 years old.
[00:19:43] 55. So I went from the age of 18 to 55 almost 40 years before I ever ate another Quarter Pounder with cheese.
[00:19:57] That just cracks me up every time I think about it. When I ate a Quarter Pounder with cheese that day, and I didn't think too much of it, and you know what? I've never had another Quarter Pounder with cheese again.
[00:20:09] I had one when I was 18 and one when I was 55 to prove to myself that I could eat one. And then I've just never eaten another one since.
[00:20:20] Also, I don't think I ate pizza for the first year after having appendicitis. Never went near a pizza again.
[00:20:31] I still worked at Sammy's Pizzeria, though.
[00:20:35] And at the pizzeria, they also sold submarine sandwiches.
[00:20:40] So if I ate anything, it was usually a submarine sandwich. It took me a long, long time before I could ever eat pizza again.
[00:20:52] But I'm here to say I have been eating pizza since I was at least 20, and I still eat a lot of pizza. I love pizza. That's the Italian in me. I guess I could live without a hamburger, but. But I can't live without the pizza. And that would be the same thing. I'm just so happy that I didn't have spaghetti the night that I had appendicitis, because it would have probably killed me not to be able to eat spaghetti.
[00:21:22] I have to have my pasta. There's just no doubt about it.
[00:21:29] So it was quite the.
[00:21:32] The lesson. I learned a lot that time around.
[00:21:35] I learned that sometimes people aren't completely honest the way that you think they are, but sometimes they can, right? They're wrong.
[00:21:44] I learned that when you've been that sick, you're not going to go back to eating the same way that you've always been eating. And I learned that being in the hospital with one of your best friends definitely makes the time go by a lot faster.
[00:22:08] Thank you for listening to my story today.
[00:22:12] I hope you enjoyed it.
[00:22:17] Until the next time.
