Children were dying “dropping like flies.” People wishpered in fearful tones. So crowded that beds, overflowing the wards, spilled out into hallways and lined the walls, each bed bearing the paralyzed from of a child.
Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine wasn’t available until 1955. Too late for me. Polio invaded my body one summer, I was eight years old. I had contracted bulbar poliomyelitis, the worst type. The disease attacked my central nervous system. It began with choking, followed by a total inability to swallow. Soon the dreaded paralysis crept into my neck, legs, and right arm.
My parents were advised that I would not live. By morning, they were told, they would no longer have a daughter. But the doctors wouldn’t let them spend the night with me. There were just too many people in the overcrowded building. My mother and father went back to their small, two-bedroom home in Michigan. They gently laid my three-year-old brother in his crib, in the same room that contained my new-empty bed. Then they sat awake, side by side. on the couch in the living room. My mother spent the entire night comforting my father. For the first and only time in their lives, she saw her husband cry.
Balancing Act. At dawn, they drove in stoic silence to the hospital. On the night my father cried, l lay unconscious with a fever of 108 degrees Fahrenheit. An old nurse pulled out of retirement recognized me by my name tag as the granddaughter of an old friend. She placed me in a bathtub with ice to reduce the temperature. Then, fighting exhaustion, she stayed awake by my side for 48 critical hours until the fever broke.
I was transferred to a ward with 20 other girls who were ravaged by Polio. The disease damaged many parts of my body the worst havoc was wrought on my spine, near the neck. I could not lift my head from the bed.
The doctors told my parents that, with therapy. I would probably regain the use of my arm and legs. But I would have to weer a brace for the rest of my life and go to a special school for crippled children.
“No,” was my father’s answer to a life of pity and dependence. “My daughter will never go to that school.” His little girl would not live out her life in braces. My father, Leland Holmes whipple, had no more than a high school education, but he read everything he could find on infantile paralysis. He talked to doctors, nurses and therapists, and concluded that if my muscles could he exercised artificially, permanent atrophy might not take place. An osteopath agreed. and my father vowed to remove me from the hospital as soon as possible to get that therapy. He instructed me, however, to do everything the medical doctors in the hospital told me to the best of my ability. This was nothing new; my father had always taught me to be my best self.
Over the months I saw many little girls leave. In wheelchairs, but my father promised me we would walk out together. I never heard “if you get well” from him. lt was always “when you get well.”
I contrived a method of sitting up for a couple of minutes at a time. I had studied ballet since the age of three, and somehow I’d flip upright and balance my head and neck on....TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
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