Trust Me, You Do Not Want Polio

With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control, this vociferous anti-vaxxer wants to eliminate all vaccines. Based on my family’s experience, let me tell you why this is a very, very bad idea.

Both of my parents had paralytic polio as children and it affected them their entire lives.

My mom was struck by it on her first day of kindergarten. She tried to get out of bed and rolled onto the floor, unable to get up.

My dad was 4 when he got it. He remembers laying in the back of his uncle’s car, staring at the pattern on the ceiling, only able to move his eyes as he was driven to the Swedish Hospital. The wards at the hospital were so full of beds that staff couldn’t move between them, one bed shoved next to another. Hospital workers had to feed and change him from the foot of the bed. He said that at night, an old janitor would come into the ward and hand out candy to the kids. He was in the hospital from July to December of 1946. The paralysis eventually went away and he walked out of the hospital in early December. After that, he had to meet annually with a physical therapist at the Sister Kenny Institute, where they “cranked” his right leg and ankle around, causing a lot of pain.

While the treatment at the Institute was considered top-notch, it was also brutal. Heat therapy was used and the affected limbs had to be exercised by a therapist, which was incredibly painful.

My mom was also treated at the Sister Kenny Institute and remembers the pain of treatment. During one incident, she resisted treatment due to the pain and was locked in a closet. Imagine being a young child and dealing with this situation. First you’re paralyzed, which is terrifying in itself, then you enter the phase of recovery and have to deal with surgeries and painful exercises and if you express how you’re feeling, you’re locked up, no parents around to help you. Further, she witnessed another child die of polio, heaping trauma upon trauma.

My mom’s parents were told first that my mom wouldn’t survive. When she did survive, they were told she’d be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She proved the medical experts wrong again but had to use crutches for some time. She also had many operations throughout her childhood and into high school to manage the aftereffects of the polio. After one surgery, a photo shows one of her legs completely encased in a cast, with two large metal pins through the leg, the area between which had to be cut because her leg had turned sideways.

One leg was about two inches shorter than the other, the muscles in her leg and foot atrophied. This atrophied foot dropped as she walked with a limp. She was never able to run after polio and she always had to buy two pairs of shoes for her different-sized feet.

My dad also had a couple of surgeries. During one of the surgeries, which took place at the Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis when he was in 7th grade, the Achilles tendon in his right leg was cut so that his heel would go down so he could walk on it. The surgery was excruciatingly painful, so bad that he was almost tearing the sheets on the bed. After the surgery, he wore a cast that was the full length of his leg, which was on for at least 9-10 months. This was an abnormally long period of time and when Dad’s parents called about why it hadn’t been removed yet, they discovered Dad’s surgeon had died.

Here’s a transcription of notes my stepmom took from my dad about what happened during and after the removal of this cast:

“Finally, he went back to Minneapolis, where they removed the cast, cutting it off, he remembers the blade being very hot. When they cracked it open, his knee jerked & locked at a 30-degree angle and stayed that way for about 3 months. The smell coming from his leg was like a deer that was dead in the woods, the hair on it was 5 inches long (he didn’t have any body hair at the time). When he would rub his hands down his leg, hair & skin would slough off. It smelled so bad that they had to have the windows in the car partially open (it was winter). He was given a brace with a hinged knee & went to about mid-thigh. He wore this about a year.”

He had a second surgery on his leg when he was 15. After the cast was removed, he was given a brace that went from the knee down. He hated this brace because he couldn’t run in it, so he took it off one day and threw it under the stairs. There is remained until my Grandpa Jens went into a nursing home and it was found by family cleaning out the house.

Dad was told he would be in a wheelchair by the time he was 30. He never ended up in a wheelchair, but his life was seriously altered by the disease. He wanted to join the Air Force, but they wouldn’t accept him because he’d had polio. In the later years of his life, he had problems with his fingers growing cold and developing gangrene. After lots of tests turned up no definitive cause, we suspected this was an aftereffect of polio.

Polio’s aftereffects later in life are so common that there’s a name for them – post-polio syndrome.

While polio appears to affect one side of the body more than the other, in actuality, all the muscles are affected. The stronger side of the body overcompensates to adjust for the weaker side, later causing those muscles to give out. My mom has had her “good” leg give out on her while she is on the stairs.

Trust me, you do not want polio. Nor do you want your children to have polio.

But, if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has his way and successfully eliminates vaccines, we’ll see polio and all the other deadly diseases return in force.

If you don’t want to see a return of polio and other deadly diseases, I urge you to write to your legislators to show your support for vaccines. If you aren’t sure your legislators will listen, contact your state governor’s office or department of health and encourage them to set vaccine recommendations based on science, not the anti-vax rantings of RFK, Jr.

If you are immunocompromised or have an allergy to some ingredient(s) in vaccines and can’t get immunized, you may also want to support vaccines for the rest of us. When the majority of a population is vaccinated, it creates a herd immunity that protects those who can’t get vaccinated.

Let’s not put anyone else through the trauma of paralytic polio.