I’ll never forget the overwhelming fear of polio that made summers quite housebound. Despite our precautions, polio hit my immediate family twice. My mother came down with it in 1948 just as she was giving birth to my brother. She was immediately transferred to Los Angeles General Hospital where all polio victims in the contagious stage of the disease were treated. She was hospitalized for six months and my brother stayed in the hospital where he had been born, adored by nurses, but separated from his mother all that time. My mother eventually recovered, though had one leg a bit shorter than the other after that. I came down with polio in September 1951, just as I was starting first grade. I had bulbar polio, affecting my breathing and causing paralysis of the right side of my face and my right arm. I was hospitalized for a year in two different hospitals. I’ll never forget when I was diagnosed. I had flu-like symptoms and my parents kept asking me to put my chin on my chest (a stiff neck was a tell-tale symptom). Despite the pain involved, I would put my chin on my chest so I wouldn’t be diagnosed with polio and have to go to the hospital. Finally, my doctor made a house call and asked me to put my chin on my chest. When I did, she held my head down and I screamed with pain. My diagnosis was confirmed at County hospital where I had a spinal tap while screaming for my parents. Though my parents were technically not allowed into the critical ward where I was taken, they got permission because my mother was a nurse. They were dressed in biohazard clothes and couldn’t touch me. But they were there including the night when I nearly died. (The other two people in the room with me — a woman about 30 who had just given birth and a 12-year-old girl both died.) I spent a year in two different hospitals, had a lot of physical therapy and, later on, went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN for electrical stimulation of the muscles in my face and right arm.
