Picture this: Girl in Throwback Thursday photo contacts us about her experience at Memorial Hospital

While scrolling through her Facebook feed, Brittany Jaso stopped and looked closely at a black-and-white photo that caught her eye. In it, she saw a nurse and student nurse tending to a small child in a wheelchair.

She picked up her phone and messaged the little girl in the picture.

The nervous toddler in braids is her mom.

“I definitely knew it was my mom right away because I’ve seen that picture my whole life,” Brittany says. “We still even have the original photo at my mom’s house.”

Anna Riblet was thrilled to see the Throwback Thursday image last week on our Beacon Health Facebook page. It always brings back memories. Anna, the youngest of five children, tells us how she lived with her parents in South Bend at the time the photo was taken during the 1950s.

She was two or three years old when the photo was taken at Memorial Hospital. The nurse and student nurse are tending to Anna’s right leg, wrapping it with a bandage. Anna suffered from osteomyelitis, an inflammation of the bone caused by an infection.

“It’s interesting, but my parents said it was from wearing shoes that were too small,” Anna recalls. “Sometimes kids have a pair of shoes that is their favorite and they just want to keep wearing them. That was me.”

Because her mom and dad didn’t have a car at the time, Anna said her doctor closed his office to drive her to Memorial for treatment.

“Parents could not spend the night with you in the hospital either at that time, and I believe I was in the hospital for a couple of months,” Anna says. “The doll on my lap is one the hospital nurses gave me, and they used to take me next door to Leeper Park.”

Anna says she has no lingering effects from the infection she suffered as a little girl.

This was not the first time Anna has seen this particular picture. She once saw it as part of a display in a downtown South Bend store window. The same photo, she says, was also made poster-size to promote the “Ball Memorial,” an annual fundraiser the hospital held back in the day.

Anna’s niece, Dr. Kim Brathwaite, currently works as a neonatologist in the NICU at Beacon Children’s Hospital.

Seeing her photo on social media last week? Anna says she was thrilled.

“I thought that was really pretty cool.”