This was written by my maternal grandmother, Alice Green-Kollenborn (1911-2005).
Mama worked hard in the fields each Fall, gathering in her crops with the help of the older boys and girls. Often even our pet pig followed us. She canned fruits and vegetables for winter use and made sauerkraut in huge stone jars and all kinds of pickles were brined down in barrels. She gathered in blackberries and dewberries from the fields and went to the woods gathering in huckleberries for canning and making fresh pies and cobblers. She let us children help pick the rich plump berries.
When I was about 8 years old, there was the sorghum cane crop to harvest this year, so with her usual vigor she went out to cut the cane with a big corn knife used for such purposes. White coating on the cane is very poisonous to open sores if it gets in.
Mama’s knife slipped, cutting a deep wound on her shin while cutting cane. Naturally poisonous white coating from cane was wet on the knife, infecting the sore. She came in early, did her regular chores. Got up in night dizzy, deadly sick with splitting headache; lived 9 miles out of town and only horse and buggy transportation. Waited until her wound had turned to gangrene before calling family doctor. Rushed out. Heart pounding and temperature high. Since no miracle drugs at that time, he did what he could. Gave her up, left for town expecting her to be gone by morning. Still bad next day. Insisted on amputating her leg. Mama never gave up. “I have to live for my children,” she told doctor and “must also keep my leg.”
Poor people never went to hospital in those days unless they had surgery and then maybe never. Doctor told her not much chance of saving her life if she insisted on keeping leg. She won out, but always crippled from lack of ligaments in leg that gangrene ate out.