Polio – Corpus

“Will I walk again?”

2 December 2019 4 Comments

Brian Bourke

In the summer of 2005 I was visiting my sisters in my home town. After Mass a woman approached, put her arms around me and said, “Brian you are still alive. You were such a lovely boy”. My wife was standing nearby with a puzzled look on her face. It was not every day that strange women put their arms around her husband. That woman was Monica. Monica had nursed me one-on-one when I was fourteen and they thought I was going to die from polio. It was 49 years since Monica had last stood beside me. In 1956, Monica was twenty, and in charge of the isolation ward of the Ashburton hospital. I only ever saw her in a long white gown, rubber gloves and a white mask. She had beautiful blue eyes and wore rimless glasses. Her quiet voice encouraged me to eat and she held on to me when I went to the toilet. I needed her help to get sitting to standing, and because I could not stand she held me during the entire operation.

She was patient with me as the paralysis took hold and was never cross with me when I fell out of bed. I felt the comfort of her arm around me when I cried, and I cried often. In the middle of the night she would shine her torch on me and ask if I was all right. Did I need a drink? Time and again I asked her, “Will I ever be able to run again?” She replied quietly, “We will see, Brian.” Even in the early stages of having polio, I knew that nothing would be the same again. Monica’s reply told me so.

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A Box of Bones (Part 2)

8 October 2018 4 Comments

Sue Wootton

This essay continues from Part 1, which you can read here.

At some point most evenings I would put down my pen and pull the box of bones towards me. The lid had a small brass hook which fastened to a matching brass eye on the base. I tapped the hook edgeways and, as it fell free of the eye, felt the box give, as if I’d unbuttoned a tight corset. Apart from the foot and the hand, whose bones had been wired together, the bones lay separated and higgledy-piggeldy. I might pick up whatever happened to be lying on the top, a rib perhaps, or the femur. At other times I needed to look more closely at a specific part of the body, and so I would fish around for that particular bone.

The knocking sound of bone on bone and bone on box comes back to me as I recall this. With practice I became good at fishing blind, my eyes on Gray’s Anatomy and one hand in the box, delving. The scapula is like a large empty scallop shell. The humerus and the fibula are long sticks. The humerus is thicker, and knobbled top and bottom. The fibula is more like a giant’s toothpick or knitting needle. A patella sits comfortably in the palm of the hand, and has a satisfying contoured shape, like a large limpet. I noticed, too, the patella’s heft, its stone-like solidity. Most of the rest of the bones in the box didn’t feel this way. They were very light in the hand, almost like holding sticks of chalk. Had they been buried, or cremated, of course, they would be less than chalk by now. They’d be dust. Perhaps beyond dust: loam, clay. Shakespeare has Hamlet imagine Alexander’s bones fully recycled in the earth, becoming clay to stop a bunghole. To what base uses we may return, Horatio.

Life with polio

17 September 2018 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

Lorraine Inwood is 88 years old. She lives in Mosgiel, near Dunedin in New Zealand’s South Island. Sixty years ago, when she was pregnant with her fourth child, her eldest son became ill with a tummy upset. He vomited several times but soon recovered. Then Lorraine went down with the same bug. She quickly became so weak and feverish that she was unable to get out of bed.

The family doctor diagnosed pneumonia. He made at least three home visits, finally telling her, “You’re convalescing now. You should be up and about.”

There was no way that Lorraine could follow his advice. She had a vicious headache and awful back pain. Every time she tried to stand she vomited again. She could feel herself becoming progressively weaker. No matter how much she willed herself to stand up straight, her body refused to obey and she remained bent double, saggy as a sack. A specialist was consulted. He recognised the signs and symptoms immediately: Lorraine had polio. She was one of 1,485 New Zealanders who contracted the disease during the 1955-56 epidemic.

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Polio and me

16 April 2018 1 Comment

Marlayna Zucchiatti

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Adolf Hitler.

Here comes Polio

In 1957, I was 17 months old, our family’s fifth and youngest child. I was, my mother says, just “nicely learning to walk”. Then I got polio. It came to me at my uncle Bap’s remote cabin one weekend in Northern Ontario, Canada. Close to midnight and engulfed by an angry storm, my mother, my father, my polio and I were taken across the dark, choppy lake to the car, to the hospital, to the dreaded news. There was no doubt. Polio: 1.

The predicted blueprint of my life had taken a detour. And I had a new, annoying companion to travel with: from now on it was Polio and me.

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Polio Survivors in 21st Century New Zealand – “We’re still here”.

6 November 2017 Leave a Comment

Gordon Jackman

Elvis Presley Salk Vaccine 1956 — Elvis Presley receiving the Salk Polio Vaccine in 1956

New Zealand hasn’t had a case of live and wild polio infection since 1962, so people would be forgiven for thinking that was the end of it, we beat that one. Indeed, thankfully the world is on the brink of eliminating the wild polio virus, with only 14 cases globally reported this year. But the late effects of polio continue to affect thousands of New Zealanders, most of whom are now in their sixties or older.

The “Late Effects of Polio” or “Post-Polio Syndrome” affects most polio survivors. Symptoms include fatigue, muscle weakness and muscle and joint pain, shortening of tendons in polio-affected limbs, difficulty sleeping, difficulty breathing, and psychological stress. These symptoms can be debilitating and may compromise health and independence. A recent systematic review of the incidence and prevalence of Polio worldwide suggests that there may be close to 10,000 polio survivors alive in New Zealand today, including a significant number who caught it overseas more recently than their New Zealand-born counterparts.

“Them rags that wells my legs”: Sister Kenny’s first polio case

31 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Australian nurse Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1880-1952) is famous for inventing and teaching ‘the Kenny Method’ for polio treatment. Her method advocated the application of hot packs during the acute phase of the illness, followed in the convalescent phase by passive movements and active muscle rehabilitation. The Kenny Method contradicted orthodox medical thinking of the time, which was to splint and immobilise the patient, sometimes for many months. Kenny’s approach was used with reported success in Australian clinics during the 1930s, and despite ongoing controversy and opposition from some medical quarters, was eventually adopted in the USA from 1940.

In her autobiography, And They Shall Walk, Sister Kenny tells the story of her first encounter with polio, and how she stumbled on the idea of using moist heat for relief of pain and spasm. Aged 23, and working as a ‘bush nurse’, she was called to a remote outback cottage, where six months previously she had helped with a birth. According to Kenny’s account, this is what happened:

“During my brief stay at the cottage six months before I had grown to love the little two-year-old sister of the new baby boy, and as I rode into the yard I expected to see her come running out to meet me. But all was quiet. The setting sun shed its soft light on the autumn flowers that surrounded even the least pretentious of Australian homes – great masses of bronze and white and pink chrysanthemums and dahlias. But the silence disturbed me. The shy youngsters usually swarm out to greet the bush nurse, and I was full of fears when the frantic mother, only a year older than I, opened the door to me.