It was 1950, and I was four years old. My doctor came to our house since we didn’t have a car. He said, “Touch your chin to your chest, please.” I couldn’t. He turned to my mother and said, “We need to get her into the hospital.” The diagnosis was polio.
I don’t know how long I was in the hospital, but it was full of children on every floor, all suffering with one or more of the three strains of polio. I know that because I was transferred many times to various floors and rooms. After I was out of isolation, I was moved to a room with a 12-year-old girl in an iron lung. We had conversations even though she could only speak when the machine forced the air out of her lungs. One day several people rushed into our room and moved me in my bed out into the hall. Subsequently I was transferred to a room with three other children. I knew the 12-year-old had died.
Luckily, I was given the Sister Kenny treatment, which meant I was wrapped head to toe in a hot, moist bath blanket several times a day, and taken to a whirlpool and suspended with several other children in a car-seat like arrangement around the rim.
After a time, I was started on physical therapy, walking between parallel bars and doing exercises for my arms and legs. My mother needed to learn all my exercises before I could be discharged. Thankfully today no one would know I had polio, but lots of children and some adults would spend the rest of their lives in braces, on crutches or in an iron lung.
You can be sure I had my children vaccinated for not only polio, but with any and all available immunizations. I believe it is an act of love to prevent a child from suffering an unnecessary disease or spreading one to anyone else.