the aching does not stop. The next day, it moves into my stomach; and a fever starts. My grandfather now gives me a heavy dose of the Inside Medicine. I don’t go to school, and by the time my parents arrive home, I’m as sick as a dog. My grandmothers are coming undone because the one thing they most fear is happening: I have become sick while in their care.
For days, my family nurses me as if I have the flu. In fact, they hope it is the flu. Yet, I seem too sick to think straight. I sleep and mumble when spoken to. My grandfather is perplexed. His medicines ought to have at least some effect. Everyone who uses them either gets better, breaks out in blisters, or throws up.
After a few days, my mother takes me to the new doctor with an office on Main Street. He puts me on the examining table and makes me say “Ahhhh.” He tells me to lie down, and then he pushes my legs up and down, up and down, with his hand holding up my knee. “No problem there,” he says.
My mother breathes a sigh of relief. “At least it’s not that,” she says.
The doctor sighs, too. “I think it’s just some other virus. Give her lots of water. She’s worn out from starting school. This will pass.”
But it does not pass, and lots of water does not help. After nearly two weeks, my mother drives me to Memphis to a renowned pediatrician. He spends about ten minutes with me and then says I need to be rushed to the Isolation Hospital, a former dormitory for medical interns, now made into a hospital to house polio patients, separating them completely from the public. What else he tells my mother I am too sick to hear. I stumble through the move, half asleep. I can walk along a few steps, but then trip.
At the Isolation Hospital, we walk down dark corridors past huge rooms where iron lung machines pump like irrigation pumps on the cotton crops at home. But these pumps are barrel-shaped, as long as the fuselages of small planes. People are lying in them with only their heads showing, while above them, mirrors reflect their faces. The sound of the pumps seems as loud as field pumps, too, but instead of water being thrown, it is air—a terrific suck as it is forced in, then a hard push out as though vacuum cleaners are hooked to the people’s lungs. The monster machines make a hissing sound that follows us down the hall.
Outside the room where I am taken, an iron lung sits, plugged in, but not pumping. I notice it with alarm. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of it. Heaven knows, it’s been paraded on the silver screen before every cowboy movie with some kid lying in it with his head sticking out. Then when the movie house lights have come up, someone has passed the plate for the March of Dimes.
It sits ready. Nearby, as if fallen into a vine, I sleep, entangled there. In and out of my room and around me, my mother and grandmother move, draped in surgical gowns and masks. In waking moments, I think how curious they look, dressed like that. Despite the danger of where they are—locked up with a whole hospital of polio patients—they stay with me throughout the night and the next day.
To what is happening I put no name. I am too sick to be afraid. I am here; that is all. I cannot move. But I am breathing.
2
PARALLEL LIVES
That year, I am among 33,267 falling down the Polio Hole. But I do not know this. I am six; I still think a woman called the Tooth Fairy comes at night to buy my baby teeth, when they fall out. I have heard the word epidemic, and I now have a sneaking suspicion I am in one. But what else I do not know could stretch across the outfield at Yankee Stadium.
I do not know that the virus that has attacked me is as old as Moses. I do not know of the stone found in Egypt, 2000 years old, with a picture etched on it of a boy with a withered leg. I do not know the virus has lain underground, mostly asleep for thousands of years, claiming few, but awakening now with a vengeance that no one understands, but, in time, will puzzle out: in our heavily industrialized nation, our ability to disinfect almost everything has brought rewards and problems. Babies have a smaller chance of “catching” the poliovirus earlier in life when the infection is mild and when maternal antibodies provide temporary protection. Therefore, infants are not immunizing themselves with a mild case when the virus is no stronger than a cold. Infantile paralysis—its name was once apt, but now infants are no longer its only prey.
An old virus has awakened and is sweeping across America.
In fact, in August of 1921, when Franklin Roosevelt, who would become the 32nd President of the United States, contracted the illness, doctors suspected the virus was changing—searching out older victims. For the next twenty years, what was known about the illness could have been written on the back of an envelope. About all doctors knew for sure was that it was a virus and, therefore, impervious to the miracle antibiotics, penicillin, and sulfa. Now in the 1950s it has become a national nightmare—not because it kills great numbers of children, but because its effects are so hideous. Paralyzed children can be seen everywhere.
Now I am one of the ones tonsil-free who, mysteriously by being so, fall in greater numbers down the Hole. To get it absolutely right, the poliomyelitis virus makes lesions in the gray matter of the spinal cord and brain stem, attacking the neurons of the spinal cord, affecting nerves that go to muscles of arms and legs but, unlike spinal cord injuries, leave touch and all other sensations. Or, the virus goes to the brain and nerves of the upper body, grabbing hold of breathing and swallowing. For years, no one even knew how someone “caught” it. What was its portal of entry? The mouth? The nose? How was it passed from child to child? Why did it come in the hottest months? Why did boys seem to get it more often than girls?
Rumors spread: Flies carry it. It lives in the toilet. It’s carried in water. Close all the swimming pools. Shut down the movie houses. Stop holding hands. Stop using library books. Spray all the mosquitoes. And, why in the ever-loving world couldn’t someone stop it?
In the 1930s, some tried. A vaccine was crudely made. But because a virus cannot live outside of a body, researchers began injecting the virus into the nervous system of monkeys and letting it grow there, then killing the monkeys and grinding up their nerve tissue to use in a vaccine. No one knew that nerve tissue from an animal injected into a human causes encephalomyelitis—a deadly inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. The results were disastrous.
Later, researchers tried a live-virus vaccine, inactivating it with chemicals and supposedly leaving just enough to give a mild form of the illness; but when they used it on children, the results were equally catastrophic. Some died; others were left paralyzed. Simply, no one understood enough about the poliovirus to prevent it, and the hope for a vaccine began to fade.
Now in 1950, when the virus gets me, hopes for a vaccine have revived. But, which one? In Pennsylvania, Dr. Jonas Salk believes in a dead-virus vaccine that will contain just enough of an inactivated virus to trick the body into thinking it has already had the illness, should it try to invade again. But, how to kill the virus effectively? How to grow it to harvest for a vaccine if not in an animal’s nerve tissue? And, can it be used in the bloodstream?
This last question is especially puzzling, for the virus did not seem to have a viremic phase, which would make a vaccine useless, since the bloodstream is where the polio battle must be waged. It is there where antibodies are built in the lymph system, then secreted into the bloodstream to attack an invading virus. Instead, the poliovirus seemed to bypass the bloodstream and go straight to the nervous system to do its dirty work, paralyzing muscles, sometimes even the ones that breathe. At the Polio Unit at Yale University, Dr. Dorothy Horstmann is working on just this crucial part of the puzzle.
In Ohio, Dr. Albert Sabin argues that only a live-virus vaccine will have the potency to build long-term immunity to prevent epidemics altogether. In Maryland at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Isabel Morgan has just walked out of her lab and shut the door.
