Polio: A Year of My Childhood in the Hospital

by Don Schellberg

There were about 50 kids in my hospital ward.

Rows of metal cribs. I was three years old, and I would be there for a year. My parents and siblings could visit on Sundays, for about two hours.

It was 1954. I had polio.

Prior to the vaccine, polio epidemics were dreaded, periodic events that struck rich and poor alike. Franklin Roosevelt, the only four-term president of the United States, was paralyzed from the waist down by the disease as a young man.

I contracted polio in 1954, at the age of three. My older siblings had already been vaccinated. But the vaccine was still in the testing phase, and I was too young to receive it. Our house and family were quarantined. I was sent to the hospital.

After a month, the fever and cramps subsided and I was no longer contagious. But I was paralyzed, so my parents sent me to St. Charles Catholic Hospital for physical therapy. I was there for one year. Even though I was only three, I can still remember that children’s ward with its rows of metal cribs. I shared that ward with 50 children, and saw my parents and siblings once a week. They were allowed to visit on Sundays for two hours.

The separation must have been very difficult for me. Seventy years later, I still cry when I think about it.

Eventually, I was able to walk with the aid of a metal brace, which I wore for about two years. When I was eight, I underwent surgery that rewired the tendons of my right ankle. The surgeon routed my Achilles tendon through my ankle, which gave me far more support. After that, I no longer needed the brace.

I considered myself very lucky to have survived with only a limp.

Some of the children I left behind remained in iron lungs.

After that, I had a mostly normal childhood — playing sports with my friends, fishing, going to school. I was the only one in my grade with polio. Shortly after my diagnosis, children began receiving the vaccine and the disease largely disappeared in the United States.

Sometimes, other kids made disparaging remarks, which more often than not provoked a fight. But for the most part, people were decent and treated me like any other child my age.

I still remember doing leg exercises in my mother’s kitchen, pushing a large stone around in her colander to strengthen my thigh and calf muscles. My parents provided everything I needed to recover. There was never any doubt in my mind that there was nothing they could have done to prevent my illness.

My parents were never at fault.

The vaccine existed, but it was still being tested, and I was too young. There was no choice they failed to make. No negligence. Nothing they could have done differently.

But if the vaccine had existed for infants, and my parents simply hadn’t gotten me vaccinated, for whatever reason, I would have resented them for the rest of my life.

That is what I want parents to understand. Vaccines exist now to prevent terrible diseases like polio. The choice is yours to make. And your children will know, someday, that you made it.

Don Schellberg contracted polio in 1954, at the age of three. His story, like all others on this blog, was a voluntary submission. If you want to help make a difference, submit your own post by emailing us through our contact form. We depend on real people like you sharing experience to protect others from misinformation.