October is Polio Awareness Month (because it used to be a seasonal illness peaking in late summer and early autumn), so this is a good time for me to share some memories of my experience with the illness.
In the summer of 1952 I was a normal 6-year-old kid playing outdoors with friends in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. One day I contracted a febrile illness and spent a night moaning in pain from muscle cramps. The next morning when I tried to get out of bed I fell to the floor because both legs were limp and wouldn't support me. My mom was an R.N. who knew what was happening, so she and dad drove me to "The Sheltering Arms" institute over on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. I was admitted to the ward indicated by the yellow arrow on the postcard image embedded above. The ward had I'm guessing 25-40 beds with maybe some privacy curtains in between, staffed by nurses who had been trained in the Sister Kenny method.
There was no cure for this viral illness, but what she discovered in her early work in Australia was that patients were able to recover some function if the affected muscles were kept active during the illness. At Sheltering Arms, pairs of nurses would go around the ward pushing a cart with near-boiling water into which they dipped woolen towels which were then applied to children's legs. The initial application would be painful, then comforting as the heat subsided into warmth, but then they returned over and over again to reapply maximally-hot towels. When some measure of stability of the illness occurred, there followed intensive physical therapy with bags and socks filled with ball bearings draped over ankles and leg lifts repeated until exhaustion.
I spent much of my summer in that ward. As an adult I later learned from my parents that my sister had also come down with polio (in the bulbar form that affected her speech and swallowing), and even my mother was affllicted. She remembers seeing my father peering through a window on her hospital room door, his face in tears as he coped with three family members simultaneously afflicted. I eventually wound up with an atrophic right quadriceps but adequate ambulatory function, and a variety of contractures that needed release and even an attempt at tendon transplant at the Mayo in later summers, but I eventually had enough recovery to permit a reasonably normal adult life - unlike so many of my schoolmates who wound up on respirators or in wheelchairs or dead. This is enough for now; I'll probably add more info in future years updates, in an effort to counteract the horribly medieval mindset of some modern politicians who feel that vaccination is too risky.
Re the postcard above, I should clarify that the window to my ward is open in the photo, because polio was spread by fecal-oral contact, not via aerosolization of the pathogen via cough. The photo also shows a small ladder leaning against the wall, which parents could use to step up enough to wave hello to their children inside.
For those interested, there are about 15 other posts in TYWKIWDBI in the poliomyelitis category.
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