When the popular pro-life writer, Frank Kennedy, was three, the obligatory public health sign went up outside his house: Poliomyelitis. Inside little Frank kept falling down and hitting his head against a table. He had contracted polio and had to learn to walk all over again.
It was especially hard on his parents since they had already lost their first child to tuberculosis at the same age.
His father, who was a semi-invalid, spent hours massaging and then exercising the atrophied muscles in his toddler’s shorter left leg. “Once a doctor advised cutting my Achilles tendon to make my leg longer. Dad grabbed me and we never went back.” Another doctor fitted Frank with a shoe-lift and insoles. To this day Frank walks with a gait.
Because he was so young when he was struck, Frank didn’t miss any school. When he entered grade one he had a concave chest “like a prisoner of war” and a poor sense of balance. In the playground he was labeled a “drunk” and “a shot in the shoulder would do me in.”
By grade four he was over the worst of the polio although he never learned to skate, never took part in competitive sports and didn’t ride a bicycle until he was 18.
His family were concerned that he would seriously hurt himself but “I really made a point of not letting it bother me.”
Frank, now 69, thinks that his own brush with polio, has given him a greater empathy with the disabled. As a young man he organized outings for the cerebral palsy residents of Belwoods Park House. Frank’s first date with Ileen, his future wife, was on Toronto Island pushing a wheel chair. Because she was a volunteer at Sancta Maria house, which counsels prostitutes, she brought along five of her girls, to be pushers too.
Jim Hughes, 53, National President of Campaign Life, was struck with polio when he was four. But this was not the first tragedy in his young life. A year earlier, just before he turned three, his father had died of a heart attack. Jim has a prodigious memory and he still recollects some tender moments with his father.
Nor will he ever forget being rushed to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. There he was squashed into a dormitory crammed full of other children who were also “crying and carrying on.” Poliomyelitis signs hung on all the beds and here were constant rounds of needle injections into every available limb.
Any young child confined to hospital wonders about death; Jim was all the more fearful after the loss of his father.
Because the muscle above his right knee atrophied, it would often cramp, locking his whole leg without warning. Jim was keen to play competitive sports but he was “not the number one pick” because his leg wasn’t dependable. One summer, leg cramps almost drowned him at Wasaga Beach.
He never had any medications or surgery but neither did he receive any physiotherapy. Worse still his fear of death haunted him until he was 12. Only then did a doctor tell him be would be fine if he just exercised. At 18 he bought a rowing machine, on which, for the first time, he could stretch all his ligaments. He right leg finally straightened out. The leg cramps never returned.
Tragedy struck again when Jim and his wife Ginny had children. Their firstborn, Stephen, and their third child, Jacqueline, both died within hours of birth because of a genetic defect. Four other children have survived.
The early loss of his father, his own bout with polio and the deaths of his two infant children have all sensitized Jim to the pro-life cause. “I would never condemn a woman who has an abortion. I can understand the hurting. I know what it is like to be raised in a single parent family and to be terribly fearful.
“I feel whole but never a day goes by that I don’t check that muscle.” Jim has discussed Post-Polio Syndrome with his doctor, but currently has no symptoms.
Frank and Jim are two of the lucky ones. Between 1927 and 1963 the “child crippler” injured 50,000 Canadian children and left another 4,000 dead. The epidemic reached its peak in the summer of 1953.
It was not until 1955 that a polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk. An oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin, was approved in 1961. By 1963 polio in Canada was tamed.
Poliomyelitis is an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. The disease was sometimes called infantile paralysis because it was thought only children could get it and that it always caused paralysis. Most cases affect children between four and 15 although polio can affect people of any age. It does not always paralyze.
Polio begins with flu-like symptoms. Most authorities believe that the virus spreads from the nose and throat and intestines of infected people. No drug has yet been found that can kill the polio virus, or control its spread in the body. Rest is crucial since fatigue may make the disease more severe.
Frank and Jim had Spinal paralytic poliomyelitis, the more common form of polio, which occurs when the virus attacks the nerve cells that control the muscles of the legs, arms, abdomen or pelvis, leaving victims paralysed.
After the initial fever subsides, therapists move the patient’s limbs to prevent deformities and painful tightening of the muscles. Later, more intensive exercises help strengthen and retrain the muscles. Less severely paralysed persons usually resume most of their previous activities. But some may need splints, crutches or braces, a few scooters and wheelchairs.
Bulbar paralysis, the more serious form of polio, results from damage to the nerve cells of the brain stem that control muscles for moving the tongue, neck, throat and diaphragm, leaving victims unable to swallow or breathe. Allan Gouldburn of Whitby, Ontario, is one of its sufferers.
In 1953, the 18-year-old Allan was confined to an iron lung for four months. He was too sick to be bored the first month. Later he passed the time talking with the other seven iron lung patients in his ward at Toronto’s Riverdale Hospital. A doctor’s suggestion that he try a night without the iron lung was “traumatic. I wondered if I would wake up in the morning.” Despite some experience with Post-Polio Syndrome, Allan is coping with the problem and today he is president of Citizens for Independence in Living and Breathing.
