confused the portal of entry issue for years. Simply, animal models do not always handle a disease in the same way that humans do.
So for a long while, the assumption was that, in humans, the virus must be contracted through the nose. Even Sabin embraced this theory, leading to the obvious simple conclusion to block the portal for the virus. Stuff the nasal passages with chemicals. Spray the air. Cover the nose and stop the epidemic.
In l941, Sabin took the lead in answering the portal of entry question by traveling to various hospitals all over the country, collecting material from those who had died from the illness. He found that, while plenty of the poliovirus was in the alimentary tract on its way to the stomach, rarely was any in the nasal passages. The crucial experiment came at Johns Hopkins Hospital when researchers cut the olfactory nerves in the nose of a chimpanzee, then fed it large doses of poliovirus by mouth. The animal quickly caught the disease. The portal of entry had definitely been found. But the mistake had stolen precious time.
Dr. Salk now decides the next pressing question to address is how many strains of the poliovirus exist. If there are numerous flu strains, can’t there be three, five, fifteen types of poliovirus?
Clearly, a new monkey test subject is needed, one that will be plentiful, small, easy to work with and also will handle the virus much the way a human does: in through the mouth, then replicating in the gastrointestinal tract. The Indian rhesus monkey becomes the final choice, and hours and hours of meetings are held discussing the best way to procure them and keep them.
By the time Dr. Horstmann figures out that the virus does indeed have a viremic phase, Dr. Salk is taking on the gruelling task of studying hundreds of samples from polio patients by passing them through monkeys in hopes of answering how many types of the virus there are.
Funny—Zip, my stuffed toy monkey, comes into my mind. Lying in the Isolation Hospital, six years old and sicker than a dog, I begin yearning for Zip—my Zip, a black furry toy with rubber hands.
5
MY NIGHT VISITOR
I am no longer contagious. It’s been a few weeks. I am safe now for anyone to be around, but I am weak; muscles have been robbed. The nurse says I have to stay here until I am strong enough to go home. Boy! That’s the pits. And what about the coffee and ketchup? But I know better than to ask. I know, too, my mother is working on it.
I am moved upstairs to a small room. This is the children’s section. The adults are all somewhere else. Farther down the hall, children the color of Verna Mae stay in rooms of their own. My new room is next to a large ward where young children live in iron lungs. The virus is finished with them, but they still cannot breathe on their own.
My mother walks into my new room. Her auburn hair, lightened to the shade of a ripening tomato, is carefully fixed. The freckles that decorate her skin look as if a cinnamon bottle has been shaken over her. She carries a whopping big bottle of Heinz Ketchup and a thermos of hot coffee. She laughs. She sets the ketchup on the table beside my bed, pours me a cup of coffee in the thermos lid, and then hands me a Sears Catalog and Zip.
Zip! My strange little stuffed toy with rubber hands: good to sleep with, good to punch when I am mad, good to whisper secrets to, good for listening to my singing with nary a word of complaint. In one of his hands is a rubber banana, ready for me to pop into his smiling mouth.
My mother stays with me through the afternoon. On other days during her visit, she wheels me into the iron-lung room to visit.
The sound of the machines is enough to make me think I am in a horror film. Heads stick out, surrounded by rubber collars. Portholes, like on a ship, are what the nurses open to reach the bodies of the kids. And there is that constant hiss.
My mother and I make friends there. A young boy, four, in his iron lung that is three times longer than he is, is a budding artist. He cannot breathe on his own, but with his mother’s and the nurses’ help, he can scribble a picture with crayons inside the iron lung and send it out.
He makes pictures to give to me every week. We swap our handiwork, and our mothers become friends, too, sometimes even going together down to the cafeteria for coffee and a smoke.
One week no picture comes. I ask my mother, as she sits beside my bed, “Where is it?” I mean his art work. “Will you go see?”
But she doesn’t get up. She fiddles with her purse. She pulls out a handkerchief. The boy has left, she tells me. He has gone home. He is no longer here.
I get the itchy feeling she is not being straight with me. She is lying. She covers her eyes. I hear the sound of her crying; then finally, she whispers the truth.
Dead? How? He was only four. He drew great pictures. He used a lot of red; there were sometimes even red trees and red cats and red airplanes and red fish. And then the thought comes: Where am I, exactly? What does all this have to do with me? I think I know. But I need it named.
I don’t ask my mother. I know she’s not up to it; besides, visiting time is almost over. When the night nurse brings my supper, I decide she’s the one. I watch her bustling around, putting the rattling tray down and pushing it near my bed.
“What is wrong with me?” I ask, but she pretends she does not hear. She is silent. She doesn’t move. Her eyes fill with tears. “Why am I here?” She ducks her head and rushes from the room.
For some time I’ve known that what I cry over is rarely what makes an adult cry; yet, my curiosity is raised to a whole new level. I’m now ready to pick on someone else. But the nurses are careful. They are quick and bubbly when they walk into my room, which doesn’t give me a chance to ask anything. Maybe the word has spread that I’m getting nosy. I’m also certainly lonely. After all, I’m here in a room all by myself where the hours are endlessly flat. TV’s not even known yet. And no radio— nothing but walls, a few toys, and the torture board at my feet.
At night I hear carts rolling down the hall, and outside, cars moving with engine noises and an occasional squeal of brakes. The glass at the window is a black mirror, giving back to me a horror snapshot of myself in a hospital bed as high off the floor as a table. Then, unannounced, a nurse rolls a stretcher into my room. “Thought you might want a visitor.” The nurse pushes a girl next to my bed.
I look over at her. She is obviously older than I am. About twelve, I guess. Her eyes flicker over at me and then stare back up at the ceiling. Nothing on her can move.
The nurse says my night visitor is being weaned from the dreaded pumping machine. Every few hours, she is taken out to let her lungs work on their own. Supposedly her lungs are being built up to an all-day outing. The nurse turns my visitor’s head on the pillow so she can comfortably see me.
We stare at each other. Her skin is black, and the strangeness of this sits in front of both of us. Our world outside would work at every turn to separate us, but no one here is saying anything about any of that. Here, the ways of our outside world are as withered as the parts of us the virus has killed. At home, Jim Crow laws would make her go to a school separate from me. At the movie theater, she’d sit upstairs while I sit downstairs. Even the candy counter would separate us with its two sides–the back for her, the front for me. And in a bus, she would never be allowed to ride in the front with me, nor drink from the same water fountain. Outside this room, we’d be kept apart as surely as the cotton gin separates white fiber from the hull. To me, none of this has ever made sense; but now, it seems especially dumb.
The nurse leaves the room. I’m scared. Will we be all right? What if
