by Melissa Johnson
My mom’s life was so hard.
She told me when she was a child that she was in an iron lung. That she had braces on her legs for years. She told me about being in a full body cast as a child, and how terribly itchy it was. And I know I’ve broken some bones, but I can’t imagine being a little kid and having your whole body in a cast.
They attempted to put graft pig bone onto her spine to fix the scoliosis. But it did not work, so they put metal rods in her back and her shoulder. And that was all when she was a kid.
She struggled a lot. She was always on disability. We never had a car. She couldn’t really wear shoes because they hurt her feet really bad. Today there’s help for people like that. But back then you couldn’t really get a custom made shoe for a person on Medicaid and disability.
She had limited mobility in her neck. She couldn’t even put her hair in a ponytail. You know, I would do that for her, and she would just be so happy.
She missed out on basics. I mean, one time I brought her crab rangoon and egg drop soup. She’d never had it before, because she was so used to poverty and just sitting. She never got to experience any kind of culture or anything like that. I helped a little bit. Like I said, I’d bring her special stuff. She’d go crazy. But her life was really, really hard.
And it’s been hard for me too. I was out on my own at 17, just like “Big old world, what do I do?” I had no guidance, so I didn’t go to college. I had all this trauma.
My mom died when I was 31. I had doctors say, “Oh, she lived a long time for someone that had polio.” But she got it when she was four. So the vaccine had already been readily available for five years when she got polio. It was ready before she was even conceived.
I went to Florida during the pandemic because I had already paid for a beach house. So I went and wore masks. I saw a car with an Alabama license plate that said N-O-V-A-X-X-X. Like people literally make not getting vaccinated part of their identity now. Which is so strange to me.
It’s very frustrating as somebody who watched what my mom went through and then what I went through separately. Because I don’t feel like a lot of that would have happened to me if she hadn’t been so severely disabled.
My mom always vaccinated me. And she always said, I’m like this because my mother thought the vaccine would give me polio. That’s why she didn’t get it for her. The sugar cube I think is what they had for kids that small. My mom always got us vaccinated and always stressed the importance of it. And I could see it with my own life and her.
So yes, I’m pro-vaccine.
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