Inside a children's hospital

Rudolfo Anaya continues to be the average reader's best look into the mind of New Mexico's Hispanic community. "Tortuga," however, is more about how one adolescent deals with hospitalization. The book's hero, nicknamed Tortuga in part because of the full body cast he wears after a broken back, describes the life in a "crippled" children's long-term care facility.

This is a work of fiction, but the hospital discussed, not named in the book, is almost certainly the Carrie Tingley Children's Hospital in what is now Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The facility is no longer a children's hospital; it's now the New Mexico Veteran's Home.

The book holds special impact for those of us who remember the polio epidemics that terrified the nation prior to the development of an effective polio vaccination. Why? A lot of the book deals with Tortuga's interaction with one polio victim who is confined to an iron lung. The novel itself is worth reading not only because of the story itself, but because of the understanding it gives us of what it must have been like in the hospital and particularly in an iron lung.

As with all of Anaya's works that I read, there is a strong thread of mysticism in the book as Tortuga interacts with some of the patients, and some of the caretakers.

The reader should be warned that this is by no means a happy book. On the other hand, it gives the reader s clear, albeit terrifying idea of what it must have been like to deal with paralysis, and particularly with polio in the 1940's and 1950's. You walk away from the book (assuming you can walk at all) feeling thankful that you didn't have to spend your life staring at the ceiling while a machine breathed for you.