Michael Kossove Many polio survivors have experienced it. You enter a room using a brace, a cane, crutches, a scooter, or a wheelchair, and before you say a word, people have already formed an opinion. They notice the disability before they notice the person. Why does this happen? Part of the answer lies in human nature; people are visual creatures. …
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Aging with Polio: Why We Were Prepared for Growing Older
Michael Kossove By surviving polio, we unknowingly enrolled in the world’s toughest life-training program. None of us volunteered for it. None of us wanted it. Yet living with polio—and later with post-polio syndrome— taught many survivors lessons about perseverance, adaptability, patience, and determination that now help us face the challenges of aging far better than most people our age. For …
Still Here, After All These Years
Lawrence C. Becker “You had polio? I thought they cured that.” If I had $10 for every time I’ve heard those words, I could sponsor a vaccination program in a village in some hard-to-reach part of the world. That would be a good thing. But polio is not “cured” by the vaccines—it is prevented. There’s a difference. Polio is not …
Polio and Me: An Inside Look
Nancy Baldwin Carter One day I was running wild through the exhibits at the Thayer County Fair in Nebraska, a typical eleven-year-old shrieking uncontrollably as the Octopus ride tossed me hither and yon, winning a kewpie doll pitching plastic balls through embroidery hoops. The next, I was in bed with the “flu.” I was soon to be rushed to the …
High Tech Breathing
David Cotcher Breathing is fundamental to life. If we do not take in sufficient oxygen or get rid of carbon dioxide (CO2) it affects every part of our body. I had polio at about 18 months and at seven I started to have a curvature of my back that developed into a double curvature called kyphoscoliosis. As I grew my muscles …
Not Just Polio: My Life Story
Excerpts from the autobiography Not Just Polio: My Life Story of Richard Lloyd Daggett, polio survivor and ventilator user: July, 1953 My mother drove to the hospital to visit almost every afternoon and both pafarents came in the evening. I’m sure it was a difficult time for them. I was their youngest child, and I was very, very ill with bulbospinal polio, the …
The FDR Bond: How a Little Girl’s Friendship With America’s Most Famous Polio Patient Changed Her Forever
Anne K. Gross, PhD On the evening of November 3, 1928, three year old Carol Rosenstiel, her braces hidden under her pant trousers, her wooden crutches digging into her underarms, stood on the platform of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, a huge suitcase by her side. Her mother, Evelyn, holding her three month old son, bent down, straightened …
Nutrition and Post-Polio
Lauro S. Halstead, MD This is the story of my personal journey to learn more about nutrition. The path I followed and what I discovered along the way are specific to my body, my nutritional needs and my disability. Some of the principles I learned may apply to others, but the particulars relate only to me. I would no more …
Acute Polio and Its Evolution: Reminiscences of a ‘Polio Fellow’
Ernest W. Johnson, MD Returning from 34 months in the southeast Pacific as a GI to my home in Akron, Ohio, I was entitled to four calendar years of a university education funded by the GI bill. I enrolled at The Ohio State University (OSU) and while rooming with a high school friend who was completing his last year of …
A Paralyzing Fear
Kathleen A. Navarre My reaction to the film “A Paralyzing Fear” ran the gamut from objective film critic to the very personal reliving of a long repressed event that seemed to happen to someone else, or in another lifetime, but also clearly happened to me. The event, polio at the age of six in 1952, is at once an intimately …