The Polio Hole: The Story of the Illness That Changed America

By Shelley Mickle

As a five-year-old, Shelley Fraser is known for mischief.

On Halloween in l949, she fancies her brother's devil costume and persuades her mother to hem it up for her. But her plan to scare the total baloney out of the neighbor's babies backfires.

At kindergarten, she throws a six-year-old birthday party never to be forgotten, falls in love at juice time, and learns to read.

Six weeks into first grade, she becomes one of over 30,000 falling down the Polio Holeâ which is the way she thinks of the illness sweeping across America.

During those years of dealing with braces, crutches, the loss of muscles that will never come back, she finds she is still very much who she always was, only more aware of the world's miracles. With a lasting lesson from her night visitor in the Isolation Hospital and a second chance as the Halloween Queen with her sweetheart Richard, she also earns a dog named Buddy, a horse with the nickname Lightn', and the friendship of a woman who teaches the enchantment of letters that can be read only with a mirror.

Shelley's battle to overcome the nightmare illness that changed America is woven into the story of the scientific development of the vaccine that nailed shut the Polio Hole. The efforts to bury the Hole worldwide is a major challenge of the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456612771

Book preview

2008

1

THE WIPE OUT

We are three blocks from home. Hold your legs out. Don’t get near the spokes. My brother is bossing, pedaling, standing up, his backside going up and down, up and down. I’m perched on the bike’s back fender with my fingers gripping the seat like a cat’s claws. My brother has a rule: if I touch him, I have to pay for it, like having to clean his stinky fish tank. But he does have a point since, when I hold onto him, I unbalance him, which puts both of us in danger of a wipe out. I mean it now. Don’t touch me. And don’t get near the spokes.

I both adore and hate my brother; but most of all I want his admiration, so I hold my legs out like boat oars on either side of the back wheel. It is October, 1950. I have been in the first grade six weeks. Today my teacher has let me out early, and my brother has gotten the same permission. After all, it’s not every day your parents become famous.

For a week they have been in New York City—my dad on business; my mother, well, up to getting on the radio, which means she’s trotted herself down to all the game shows to see if she can be selected as a contestant. All her life she has craved to be an actress, even went to acting school in New York before she got married and had my brother and me. Then two days ago, bingo! She was chosen.

Now she was sitting in the audience of a game show called Rate Your Mate, where a husband rates what his wife will know. In about ten minutes, she will get up out of the audience and win a bunch of money, since we’re all dead certain she won’t know the answers to even the simplest questions. And when my father predicts that, they’ll win a bundle. It’s about the most exciting thing to ever happen in our little Arkansas town. Practically everybody is stopping work, turning on radios, spinning up the volume.

My brother is now heading onto the packed gravel road two blocks from our red-painted house. There, our three grandparents are waiting for us: two grandmothers and our grandfather, who’s the town’s retired doctor. Three against two—those are the best odds to care for us while our parents are away.

•

The announcer calls my mother’s name. She hurries onto the stage, taking her place behind the microphone. So, where are you from? the game-show host asks.

My mother looks out into the audience. McCrory, Arkansas. Her accent twangs.

Where is that?

Down the road a piece from Bald Knob.

A piece of road?

My mother bats back, Oh, you know, it means just a little way.

The audience roars with laughter. Obviously, she fits their idea of a hillbilly visiting the big city.

Can you give us any more of an idea where exactly McCrory, Arkansas, is?

Oh, sure. It’s between Pumpkin Bend and Cotton Plant.

The laughter now explodes. My mother doesn’t understand why. She looks down to see if her slip is showing. The laughter grows even louder. She fiddles with her buttons, making sure they are all closed. The laughter becomes deafening.

The game show host waits, delighted. Finally, my mother catches on. Aha! So, the audience thinks she is dumb. Well, she certainly knows how to play that role. She jumps on the moment like a butterfly hitchhiking on a biker. All her life, this is exactly what she has been waiting for.

And what do you do there?

I’m a homemaker. But I used to be a teacher.

What did you teach?

Speeeeeech.

•

In the second block toward home, I’ve concentrated so hard on doing what my brother has told me not to do, that I do it. The toe of my saddle oxford sneaks into the back spokes, and bang!—the bike throws us like a rank mule. Sprawled on the packed gravel, we look at each other. The back wheel is bent; the bike will not move. My shin looks like a carrot rubbed down a cheese grater. My brother is mad, but he is scared, too. I told you not to do that! Now we’re going to miss the show.

Half rolling, half carrying the bike, he holds my shoes because I cannot bear the tightness of leather on my swelling toe. We walk in the house just as the last few of my mother’s questions air. The game show host is asking my father, Will she know who Amerigo Vespucci was?

No.

Can she name a river in the state of New York?

No.

Will she know who discovered how to pasteurize milk?

No.

My father predicts perfectly my mother’s answers, and they win a lot of loot, at least what is considered a lot of loot in an Arkansas cotton town in the 1950s.

That night, I go to bed, bone-tired. Both my grandmothers rub cooling salve on my road burns. When I complain of mysteriously aching shins, my grandfather rubs on his homemade medicine. Even though he is the town’s retired doctor, he is still famous for the patent medicines he swirls up in tubs in his office. His doing this is not so wildly weird considering America’s love-affair with self-dosage, a culture rooted in a time when patent medicines, those available without a prescription, were widely distributed and as popular as wine.

Immigrants brought their remedies with them. Indians taught white people how to use leaves and roots as medicines. Coca-Cola was made as a headache remedy and a pick-me-up by Georgia pharmacist John Pemberton. In fact, in 1890, the greatest percentage of Atlanta’s income came from patented drugs.

For years, farmers had been using my grandfather’s medicines—one for the inside of the body; one, for the outside. Indeed, farmers were always quick to brag of half-dead pigs revived by my grandfather’s medicines and of ailing relatives made well and whole. We call his Inside Medicine Vit-a-meeens, and his Outside Medicine, Stinking Stuff—because it is. It tends to leave a trail on you that even a drugged, arthritic bloodhound will get up to sniff out. Now with the Stuff rubbed all over my calves, I smell like a tractor that’s been stuck in a swamp and is leaking oil.

But 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