Not Just Polio

We arrived at the Los Angeles County General Hospital and entered the Communicable Disease Ward. This was a very old, red brick building on Zonal Avenue, just west of the main hospital building. Everything inside seemed old, too. I was put in a bed and they began giving me more tests. Every time a doctor came by he would ask me to try sitting up in bed without using my arms. This seemed to have some special significance. I did this about a dozen times and had no difficulty. In the afternoon they did a spinal tap. They told me it was a test to see if I had polio. The tap itself was very painful, but what hurt even more was trying to get in the knees-to-chin position that a tap required. They kept asking me to bend forward more but the pain in my back was really intense. I spent the rest of the afternoon in a small alcove off a much larger room. I could see other children in the larger room. Although they were all in bed they didn’t seem to be very sick. Some of them appeared to be playing games of some kind. That night my legs began to ache and they moved me to a smaller room. Shortly after midnight I started to have trouble sitting up. I needed to urinate and I could see a urinal on the nightstand next to my bed. I tried to reach for it but my arms wouldn’t cooperate. With great effort I finally reached it but I was completely exhausted. I wasn’t sure how a person was supposed to feel if they had polio, but not being able to sit up told me I had it. I distinctly remember saying to myself, ‘Uh Oh. I think I have it.’ When my parents came to visit on Saturday I told them the same thing, “I think I have it”. I said it almost apologetically. I knew my parents didn’t want to hear this. I was very naïve. I had no real understanding of how serious my condition was. Oh, I knew that I was completely paralyzed, but the long-term impact did not sink in. My greatest concern was that I might miss the first day of school. Part of this may have been because my only direct knowledge of polio was through the Elwood boys. They had polio in 1948. They were in the hospital for about three weeks and then reappeared without any visible aftereffects. As I lay motionless and on life support I thought about starting school in September. After a couple of weeks I realized I wasn’t going to suddenly jump up and start walking, but I still thought I’d leave the hospital before school began. I could visualize going back to school on crutches or maybe a slight limp. In a kind of demented way this appealed to me. I figured all the girls would fawn over me. Perhaps a person’s mind tries to protect itself from reality. Or, perhaps my mind was just overly dense. Before polio I bit my fingernails. I tried to break the habit but not very successfully. In the iron lung I couldn’t bring my fingers to my mouth. After a few days I could tell my nails were longer. I mentioned this to my parents and my father said he’d buy me a nail clipper and file if I continued to let them grow. Here I was, encased in a large, 900 pound metal cylinder with just my head sticking out. I couldn’t move, breathe, or swallow. But when my father offered to buy my own personal nail clipper I felt as if I’d just won the lottery.