Mail Order Bride: Forging A Family – The Fat Man & The Thin Woman

By Doreen Milstead

A woman stricken with TB, or consumption, decides the only way to have a chance of getting better is to move to a state with a dry climate, and then marry a man. She knows he is very overweight, but does not tell him when they correspond that she is sick with a possibly contagious disease. He, on the other hand, does tell her that he has challenges; namely cutting out his drinking and gambling and losing at least a hundred pounds if he wants a family, and that he needs a woman who can help him achieve his goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Hart
• Release date: Feb 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311552440

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Mail Order Bride: Forging A Family – The Fat Man & The Thin Woman

By

Doreen Milstead

Copyright 2016 The Sweet Romance Network Presents…

Synopsis: A woman stricken with TB, or consumption, decides the only way to have a chance of getting better is to move to a state with a dry climate, and then marry a man. She knows he is very overweight, but does not tell him when they correspond that she is sick with a possibly contagious disease. He, on the other hand, does tell her that he has challenges; namely cutting out his drinking and gambling and losing at least a hundred pounds if he wants a family, and that he needs a woman who can help him achieve his goals.

As she sat in the waiting room for her chance to see Doctor Flick, Amanda Giddings could not help but draw the attention of other patients with a deep-throated cough. She had experienced the cough for more than three weeks, and it had taken its toll on her. She was exhausted, had chills, and was weak. Her mother, Elsa, adjusted the blanket around her daughter, as Amanda commenced shivering. Dr. Flick will be with you as soon as he can, she assured her daughter.

Amanda was crying. I have the consumption! she declared. I’m going to die!

What does a mother say to her ill child when everything they knew about consumption—now called tuberculosis—was that it was a certain death was in the offing?

Not a lot was known about the disease, except that it seemed to hit people of all ages, and was a worldwide epidemic. One of the symptoms of the disease is that the patients had little in the way of appetite, and because of that, they often experienced significant weight loss.

Amanda threw off the blanket. One minute I am very cold—the next I am very hot. And…. Her speech was interrupted by the incessant cough—that deep from the gut cough that seems to take over her whole being. This time, she darted her hand into a pocket and withdrew the now soaked handkerchief, with which she attempted to stifle the sputum coming from her stomach.

There was no question but what the malady was consumption. Several of their acquaintances had suffered the same symptoms. Some had been hospitalized there in Philadelphia, while a few of those she knew to be wealthier had been separated into one of the available sanatoria higher in the Pennsylvania mountains. These were cases, Amanda had been told, where the disease had reached the point of contagion, where simply exposing it to friends and family would add those members to the epidemic.

However, Amanda had one thing going in her favor. The doctor for whom she was now waiting was one of the preeminent medical men in the city and one whose specialty was in the treatment of tuberculosis.

The Giddings family of Philadelphia was poor by anybody’s standards. Father Barry Giddings had been killed in the summer of 1894 in an accident on the waterfront, when a crane cable snapped while offloading cargo. The cargo had fallen and crushed the father of three. Mother Elsa, left with the care of their three children—Amanda, 18; Jeremy, 14; and Andrea, 10, had managed to scrape together barely enough to survive, helped by the generosity of the little Methodist congregation of which they were members.

To the best of her ability, Amanda had helped. She was, she told them, of marriageable age, and while she was not yet at the majority age