by Carol Lindsay
My mom and my grandmother, and my Uncle Ed, all told the story of when my mom got polio. She talked about the health department coming over and putting the sign on the door that said polio. No one could leave. Everyone was confined to that house.
They had to walk four miles to a doctor. They basically said, stay home, and if you survive, you survive. And then, at some point, Shriners swooped in, and they took her to a Shriners Hospital in Ohio. She didn’t lose her ability to breathe. She just lost her ability to walk or move her right arm.
We were just born with the fact that Mom had polio. There was always Mom falling down. My whole childhood, I had this trauma of, was my mom going to fall at the grocery store? She slipped on a grape at the grocery store. She fell at the hospital. She fell in the yard.
Polio affected her self-esteem, and just every part of her life. It affected her parenting, it affected her ability to do things, it affected her confidence. And it affected all six of us kids.
She felt like everyone thought they were better than her because she limped. Yet she was so remarkably talented, and so smart, and so gifted, but she never saw it.
Her father left when she got sick with polio. She felt responsible for her father leaving, because he couldn’t handle her being sick. There was just so much trauma around one stupid disease.
And there was no vaccine. There was no option out for her. I can’t even imagine how angry I would be if my grandmother had opted out of her getting immunized, and her suffering all that, and then it going for generations, when there was a way to prevent it. I just can’t even fathom it.
In the later years, she got post-polio syndrome, and she lived with me for the last 20 years of her life. She had a lot to say about people that didn’t vaccinate. To her, it just wasn’t an option not to vaccinate.
What would my mom’s life have been like if she didn’t have polio? Heck, maybe I wouldn’t be born. But I know that her life would have been very, very different if she had not been physically and psychologically damaged from polio. She would have had confidence, and potentially us kids would have had a different life.
Would it be a better life, a worse life? I mean, that’s a Star Trek episode. I don’t know all the parallel lives. But I just don’t think anybody would choose polio. I just can’t imagine you’d say, “Oh yeah, I think I’m up for that.”
Yet when you don’t get immunized, you’re kind of choosing polio.
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