Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9312100275
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Margie Fisher
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's my own fault. After moving last fall from a townhouse development with a pool in the county to an old house in the city, I could have joined a swim club. Or I could have accepted friends' offers to use their backyard pools, or go as a guest to their swim clubs.
My "new" old house, though, requires lots of fixin' up, and yardwork. The weekends aren't long enough to get in all the chores. But on sweltering hot days, when I've been for hours in the yard with a weed-whacker, I absolutely lust for the feel, look and smell of cool, chlorinated, blue-green water. In the early evenings, sitting on my back porch, I can hear the thunk-du-dunk of the diving board as kids jump into the pool over at the Elks Lodge, and I feel envious and spiteful.
The sense of deprivation reminds me sadly of my childhood.
Growing up in Roanoke in the 1940s was not easy. Never mind that a war was on, that my father was in Germany fighting in it, that my mother, brother and I had moved in with my grandparents for the duration.
It was a childhood of mind-wrenching terror, as summer after summer seemed to bring ever-worsening polio epidemics. Worst of all, at least in my memory, was 1944, when I was 7.
My grandparents' house wasn't far from Roanoke Memorial Hospital - then, known aptly as Crippled Children's Hospital. Every day, every night, the air was pierced by the sound of ambulance sirens, as hundreds of children throughout Southwest Virginia were rushed to the hospital with the dreaded disease.
Panic gripped our household, as it seemed to grip every street in Roanoke. My brother and I were not allowed to go to a swimming pool, or to the movies or to Lakeside Amusement Park, and sometimes not even to Sunday school, since these were places where the virus might lurk. Playmates were limited to a few other children in the neighborhood. With too little to do, imaginations went wild.
One July day, I remember running into the house and screaming that thousands of Germans and the Japanese were parachuting into our backyard. The "parachutes," it turned out, were advertising pamphlets dropped from a low- flying plane.
But it was the sleepless, hot nights with wailing ambulance sirens outside the windows that sent me over the edge. The bogymen in the dark were not jackbooted foreign soldiers. They were ominous, ugly, hulking, bellowing iron lungs, which, the newsreels had convinced me, were contraptions where they put you and made you stay the rest of your life if you "got it."
To a 7-year-old, that was a fate worse than death - and, yes, I knew some children were actually dying of polio.
I became obsessed with muscle twitches and cramps in my limbs. Many a night, I paralyzed myself with fear. I would cry out to my mother and grandparents that I could not move my legs. "I've got it! I know I've got it!"
They'd come, turn the light on, sit by my bed and assure me that the cramps were "growing pains." But, in truth, they were as scared as I that the vicious epidemic might have claimed me.
Maybe I exaggerate how bad it was. Almost always, my childhood memories are happy ones: of mama taking me to see MGM musicals, and granddaddy taking me to Hopalong Cassidy serial movies at the old Rialto; of vacation Bible school; of roller skating for hours on end; of family outings at Lakeside, where I rode "the thriller," ate cotton candy, visited the "crazy house" of mirrors - and went swimming.
But, indeed, polio was the sword of Damocles that hung in the summers until, blessedly, the Salk vaccine, and later the Sabin vaccine, came along to put an end to the hot-weather tyranny.
In 1950 - five years before the Salk vaccine was introduced - 1,200 Virginians, mostly children, were stricken with the disease. Wythe County in Southwest Virginia was particularly hard hit, with 187 cases confirmed that summer, 17 of them fatal. Roanoke Memorial - an armory of iron lungs and isolation wards - cared for 450 polio victims in that one year. It had a full- time teacher on its staff, to try to help stricken youngsters keep up with their schoolwork.
Nationally, there were 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 cases each year - peaking in 1952 with nearly 58,000 new cases.
In the summer of '54, the sword was still hanging over me - as the mother of an infant son. It hung into 1956, when my second son was born. But by then, the Salk vaccine was available here. There began all-out campaigns, pushed by local doctors, to get every child, and later every adult, vaccinated.
Mobile clinics came on the scene, on downtown street corners and at businesses. Nearly every day, there were newspaper stories and graphics tracking the number of children and adults who'd had their shots. Similar voluntary immunization campaigns were launched in other communities.
Incredible, some parents resisted. Were they crazy? To me, it was nothing short of a miracle that doses of vaccine on a sugar cube or in a needle could hold at bay a disease that had stalked me, and might yet get my little boys.
To its credit, Roanoke city in 1960 became the first localities in the state to pass a compulsory polio-immunization ordinance. Other cities and counties followed suit. Cases slowed to a trickle. By 1964, the disease virtually had been eradicated. That, I thought, was the end of that - and good riddance.
Of course, it wasn't the end for many survivors of the polio epidemics - 640,000 of them, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Many who'd fought heroically in the '40s and '50s just to keep breathing, or to get their feet moving, had to keep on fighting:
Against job discrimination for the handicapped. For access to public buildings for those confined to wheel chairs or on crutches. For the dignity of the physically disabled.
In recent years, survivors also have had a new health concern. It is the mysterious post-polio syndrome, which, it's believed, may strike as many as a fourth of the survivors. This malady can bring new waves of polio's symptoms - headaches, sudden fatigue, muscle weakness and extreme pain - decades after the original illness, even though no polio virus is present in the body.
No one can explain it. And while the syndrome is apparently not fatal, there is no known cure. Moreover - perhaps because the epidemics' survivors are getting older and are dying off anyway - medical research seems not much interested in looking for an explanation or a cure.
In face of what polio's survivors have been through, and may continue to go through, it's not so awful to have spent a summer without going swimming.
by CNB