Tag: polio

The BioGeek Summer Reading List: Polio

Hannah hanging out with the summer books.

It’s been a kind of slow summer because… tendonitis… but I am getting a lot of reading done. I had moved some books into the craft room with the intention of reading them *someday soon*, and then just like that, this became the summer of nonfiction, disease book reading. Hey, I’m a BioGeek, and these books are actually pretty interesting. I had some idea of organizing the books into an order that made sense, but the topics kept overlapping so much I am just going to dive in and start talking about what I’ve been reading about and how it connects to me. Should I talk about the books from my days in the classroom? The book that made me start hoarding essentials in case of a pandemic? The book that made me aware of ebola? Hmmm… Let’s start out with the one that has a lot of personal connections to me and my family…

It’s August 14th, 1945. My mom had just arrived in New York City from Argentina, returning to the United States to visit her sister, a member of the Women’s Army Corps in Washington, D.C. I’m guessing that NYC was in an uproar that day, as it was the exact date of the end of World War Two here in the US, being Victory over Japan Day. For my mother, however, it was also the start of her involvement in another type of war.

Halfway across the nation, an epidemic of polio had broken out in the state of Illinois. There was a national call for nurses, and the American Red Cross contacted my mom, asking her if she could go. Here is the chart showing the dates of newly diagnosed cases in city of Rockford and Winnebago County, Illinois that year.

It was a big outbreak, and mom was one of many, many nurses and other health professionals who answered the call. Just like that, polio became part of the story of my family. My mother met my father when she was sent by the Red Cross to another potential polio outbreak in Albuquerque, New Mexico; he was a patient recovering from his service in North Africa when she met him there. The polio outbreak didn’t amount to much, but the romance did. 🙂 One of my first memories was getting a polio vaccine. I remember collecting dimes in a cardboard folder as a participant in the March of Dimes. I once was smuggled into the hospital by my mom, clutching an ornry yellow cat named Henry, to show him off to a woman in an iron lung; she had been in that iron lung for years and my mom had been sharing tales of Henry’s misadventures with her. Some of my classmates had had polio, and I knew people who wore leg braces. Much of my childhood was colored by polio. In my mind, polio was a terrifying, ever present disease that had gripped the USA.

I read Polio: An American Story a few weeks ago, thinking that it would enrich my understandings of the polio time that I had lived through. Boy, did it ever! There was so much that I didn’t understand about polio. It was an illness that emerged as outbreaks in communities with modern plumbing and higher levels of sanitation. The common understanding came to be that polio was a virus that was common in poor sanitary conditions, and most people exposed early developed immunity without significant illness. I did not see that coming! It was also not the most dangerous or significant disease in the US at that time, but it was one that felt terrifying. The president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a polio survivor. The fundraising campaign to find a cure for polio, a vaccine to prevent illness, was boosted by this president and the national spotlight that he brought to these efforts. A private organization, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, provided for the care and rehab of polios and funded the development of the polio vaccines. The organization later became known as the March of Dimes: the very entity that I once collected dimes for. The vaccine trials used children, 2 million of them, as guinea pigs (!), and there was significant conflict between the two major researchers who used different approaches: Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, and the battle became political. As vaccine production ramped up, lessons were learned about product control. In many ways, the national drive that existed during WWII was continued in the drive to conquer polio. The first vaccine, developed by Salk, was announced in March of 1953 to national celebration.

This book was really engaging, and I leaned so much. Imagine a private organization that takes over to provide for your care when you are diagnosed with a disabling disease! Who knew that the battle of the vaccines was so intense, and the process to verify efficacy so convoluted. Some of this applies to our situation today as people here in the US are questioning the efficacy of vaccines and the validity of the development process. Some of that is grounded in the long, checked history of polio vaccines. That first vaccine I remember was the Salk vaccine developed from inactivated viruses. Years later a live virus version of the vaccine, the Sabin vaccine, became more widely used, but today the Salk vaccine is once again used. Here in the USA, it is easy to think that polio is a disease of the past, but it lives on in other areas in the world.

So, what was next on my BioGeek reading list? Tuberculosis!!! Stay tuned…

Notes:

  • It was hugely ironic that my mom arrived back in the US on the very day the war with Japan ended. Years before, while her parents were attempting to enroll her in nursing school, her sister, waiting in the car, heard the first report of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the radio; America’s entry into WWII was immediately afterwards.
  • The fundraising and research drives of many organizations connected to disease prevention, treatments, and cures are modeled on the success of the polio campaign. I hear the echos over the decades now with every email from the National Scleroderma Foundation.
  • Oh, how is my scleroderma doing these days? Tendonitis continues, but my latest visit with my cardiologist went well: my pulmonary arterial hypertension is stable, and my heart is doing okay. The EKG isn’t completely normal, but I’ll take it, right?!! He wants to add another drug or two, but we are delaying for now as I’m already taking a LOT of medications.
  • Last week was the anniversary of day my doctor ordered the blood tests that led to my diagnosis of Sjogren’s Disease and Limited Systemic Sclerosis.

That was 22 tests in 14 vials of blood. Today I take 22 pills a day. Kind of ironic, right? Do I consider yarn to be part of my essential treatment? Why yes, yes I do!

Lessons My Mother Taught Me

My mom was amazing. She had a life that could serve as the foundation for a novel, but to me she was just mom. The lessons that she taught me were a reflection of her time, but they have turned out to be good life lessons for any generation. Here they are:

  1. We are all citizens of the world. My mom was born in Japan to American citizens of Swedish descent; her first spoken language was Japanese. The family lived overseas due to my grandfather’s job, and she was raised in Illinois and Argentina. Along with the English that she learned in America, she was also fluent in Spanish and had some French on the side. After marriage she lived in Hawaii and Southern California. She had a cosmopolitan view of the world and would not tolerate any prejudice of any kind. If she didn’t like someone, it was absolutely personal. Lesson learned.
  2. People are more important than money. My parents valued service to others and the nation above making money. My mom was a nurse and my father was in the civil service. They gave as much money as they could to charity; one year they were in the newspaper because they had donated so much to The United Way. My mom was a pediatric care nurse when I was young, and she fostered some of her patients who needed homes after leaving the hospital. She always gave 10% of her income to her church. We weren’t rolling in money but we always had enough. I learned from mom that you don’t need money to be rich.
  3. The most valuable thing you acquire in life is your education. My mother was admitted to a university after finished high school, but her father wouldn’t let her attend. When I wanted to go to college myself she moved mountains to make it possible for me, and then entered college herself. We raced to graduation with mom finishing a few months before me. She told me we were making the best investments of our lives, and she was right. Cancer cheated her of her Master’s Degree, but I thought of her the entire time I worked on mine. The diploma on my wall is hung next to her picture. Thank you, mom.
  4. Get your vaccinations! My mom was a Red Cross nurse during the polio outbreaks of 1945. It was a dreadful time. She was a nurse at an outbreak in Illinois where hundreds of people became ill, and many died or were left with lasting damage. When the polio vaccine became available we were some of the first to receive our shots. She worked on the pediatric ward of a county hospital and saw many children die or suffer permanent injury from “childhood” diseases such as measles and diphtheria. Throughout her life she insisted that we get every vaccine available as soon as we could. To this day I regard vaccines as one of the greatest achievements of science.
  5. Take germs seriously when it is appropriate, but don’t worry about them the rest of the time. Wow, we learned draconian germ control methods when there was an outbreak of illness in the house. Safe food handling was a way of life for us. Otherwise, things were pretty casual. She kind of felt that your immune system needed to see germs to develop normally, and mom would have laughed at all the anti-bacterial products on the market. I have to say, I very rarely become ill. Mom knew what she was doing.
  6. Repurpose, recycle, reuse, and eat your leftovers! My mom was a child of the Great Depression. She did her homework writing in the margins of the newspaper. She invented Life Hacks before anyone else knew about them. She knitted, sewed, cooked, and made all of our presents. She empowered me to learn how to sew baby clothes, can peaches, tape drywall, lay tile and make plumbing repairs. This is also why I can’t seem to throw away all my biology teaching stuff in the garage. I just KNOW I can use some of it again for SOMETHING.
  7. It never looks how long it took you to do something, only how well you did it. Usually this was said as I ripped out a zipper to sew in for the third time. I think she meant it to comfort me, but it was really good advice. Don’t ever settle for less than your best.
  8. Feed your roses every month, prune them every three months, and if they don’t produce the way you want them to after a year, rip them out and go get some new ones. Mom took her roses seriously and her roses were amazing! People came off the street, knocked on her door, and asked her about them. I remember them as 6 feet tall and always blooming (OK, this was San Diego and such things were possible). When you think about this, her advice for roses is also good for life. Sometimes, no matter how much love, care and time you spend on someone or something, there comes a point where you should cut your losses and move on. You leave that job, your marriage ends, best friends get downgraded. That’s life, mom would say. Move on.

My mom in 1986. She died of cancer a few months later.
My mom in 1986. She died of cancer a few months later.

My mom died 28 years ago this week, but her lessons live on. It is not possible to minimize the effect that she had on my life. Her lessons grounded me, and I’m still trying to live the example that she set for me. She surrounded herself with books and read every day. She established a scholarship to allow a woman to enter the ministry, created nursing courses to meet the needs of her community, and wrote her congressman when she wanted action. She was a woman of faith who demanded evidence before she made a decision. She has been and continues to be the role model for my life. I love you, Mom!

Happy Mother’s Day!