Although Polio had been around for centuries, it reached a peak of almost epidemic proportions in the late 1940s and early 1950s. My father was one of those children who fell victim to the infantile paralysis. He was just 4 years old.
When I asked him what he remembers, he said mostly just having a horrible headache. Back then, windows and drapes were still closed tight in a sick room, so he remembers a pain filled dark. He was sent to a hospital in the big city, but didn't need to be put in an iron lung.
Dad was one of the lucky ones. He didn't need to wear braces on his legs. He wasn't condemned to a wheelchair. As he grew older, there were a few things he found difficult to do; positions he could not sit in, but it was very minimal. He went out for baseball, football and lacrosse in high school and college. He played center on his college football team.
Nowadays, we take for granted that our children won't get sick. Sometimes, when I am doing family history and read about a mother who lost 5 of her children to illness, I wonder how she handled the pain. I know that my grandmother, grandfather and aunts were really worried about my father as he lay fighting polio. He is from the first generation of childhood vaccines. His is the border era of our country where children still died, but most didn't. Antibiotics and vaccines that became prevelant in the following decades lowered the infant mortality rate significantly.
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2 comments:
omg... I could have written this about my mother. She spent 16 months about 200 miles from her home in a hideous looking ward, sharing ward bed space with 20 other victims. Her mother visited once a month, after an overnight bus trip. She was 8. Her father and 6 other siblings were never able to visit.
The treatment of choice was to take towels, fresh from a boiling pot of water and wrapping her legs 6 times a day.
I remember when I was 8, 1965 (I am old), and in the third grade. There was a mass inoculation around the country. It was the first time I heard my mother talk of her disease past. there were a group in our church (fundamentalist Bapist) that was fighting the idea. My mother, all 5 foot 1 inch of her stood in the pulpit (first woman I recall in that pulpit), and told her story. I remember her looking the ringleader of the anti-vacination crowd in the eye and telling her the story of her mother's trips to visit, looking the woman's husband in the eye and telling him about her father who she didn't see for months and months.
My mother is 72 years old, and last month we went mountain climbing together.
My grandfather was also struck by polio but did have the leg brace from the time he was 8ish on. He had it rough right from the get-go. He was the second twin and literally had to have the life beaten into him (a "blue baby"), then polio, then the night he got engaged to my grandmother he was so excited he was a little reckless driving home and went over an embankment. Broke just about every bone in his body! They didn't bother setting them at first because they didn't think he'd make it and when they discovered that he was (tough snot that he was), didn't give him any sorta pain killer when they had to then go rebreak some of the bones that were already starting to set incorrectly ... with a hammer. The day he died he was still upset with himself for passing out after the 3rd bone! First (of several) heart attacks at 35. Many times over the years when we were told he'd have, at best, only a few months left. He ended up with decades!!!
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