It Is What It Is, Now Deal With It

By David Greenfield

Poliomyelitis or "polio" is a term deeply imbedded in the medical history of the United States. While this virus at times had a pandemic dimension and produced a variety of impacts on personal behaviors, lifestyle and even national policies, unlike the current pandemic it had a definitive and happy ending. H

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bowker
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986857220

Book preview

PROLOGUE

When the symptoms first appeared, I did not— would not —entertain the idea that it was polio all over again. It was late spring 2017. I was well into my seventies, an aging man enjoying his retirement and light-years past polio, the monster that had stalked me as a child.

Besides, there were so many other plausible explanations for the fatigue I felt after one of my usual workouts.

But when the occasional aches and pains became worse and the falls occurred more frequently, when I started to use a cane and had to descend the stairway at home in a seated position, it became pretty apparent that something more sinister was involved.

Before I knew it, I was sitting across from a specialist, receiving a diagnosis that I considered to be a death sentence. The symptoms pointed to one neurological culprit. My childhood enemy—the dreaded crippler—had returned.

The prognosis was as grim as could be. It was not treatable. Its course was unknown. There was no time frame for the disease’s progression. In my case, there was a chance (actually, it was a long shot) that the intensity of the symptoms had reached its peak. But the rapid onset of symptoms indicated I had a lot less time than even the experts predicted. The aches and pains that in a few months had transformed me from a guy who could power through squats at the gym to someone unable to walk his dog without a cane would worsen, my muscles would waste away, and my strength would dwindle. That was the more likely verdict in my case. Polio, this second time around, was hurtling toward a devastating climax that would confine me to a wheelchair, robbing me of the vibrant and independent life I had known.

When the doctor told me, I did not cry or cover my face in my hands. I burned with the anger of a man shaking his fist at the sky. My mind raced with ugly images, not of me in pain but of me having lost control, returning to those long hours in an iron lung when I had to be spoon-fed and cleaned. I was terrified. I went home and sat in a quiet dark room for a long, long time. A tiny voice inside said, Maybe you should just disappear.

First came denial. I simply could not have polio, not again. The resurgence of symptoms that defined the original disease, which is known as post-polio syndrome, was a diagnosis I had feared the moment I learned it existed. Was that as a teenager who was finally past the excruciating treatments and surgeries to correct limbs that polio had maimed? Or was it as a graduate student who developed an almost religious attachment to weekly gym workouts way before gym membership became a thing? The truth is, from the moment I learned that specks of the virus could lurk inside me, waiting for another chance, I tucked even the suggestion of its return into the back of my mind. I threw myself into life.

Next came self-pity. I’ve survived near-total paralysis, a collapsed lung not once but twice, cancer, and the loss of my wife. Haven’t I yet paid my dues?

How long I indulged those thoughts (which I hate to admit) I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I would say not long at all. It wasn’t because pride in having defeated those calamities filled me with supreme confidence that I could annihilate this new one, too. It was because self-pity was not in my nature. It never was. You won’t get sympathy from me, my dad told me more times than I can count. He was a big softy, a gentle soul, but if he detected self-pity in my tone, he nipped it in the rear. Self-pity didn’t make me walk on my own. It wasn’t going to keep me in the fight against a crippling disease determined to leave its mark.

That brings me to the title of this book. It Is What It Is, Now Deal With It. That was another of Dad’s favorite sayings, and one that I’ve adopted. Frankly, I use it so often that my daughters are sick of hearing me say it. But when I was coming up with a title for this book, that seemed to be the only logical choice. Life happens. Take it as it comes. Face it head on. Embrace change. Adapt. After all, hadn’t that been my steadfast mantra, the only way to explain the challenges I’d overcome?

Through the years, Dad’s simple script became much more than an oft-repeated saying. I am not being dramatic when I say that its meaning became absorbed into my subconscious. I incorporated it into my being. It kept me strong, kept me believing, made me plow ahead. I am convinced it can do the same for anyone who repeats it. The mind is a powerful thing.

Now that an old foe had returned, the question for me remained: After all these years, would Dad’s words still ring with the same force? Could his simple message shoulder me through this latest go-around with a tireless opponent bent on claiming me once and for all?

After I was past the shock, the denial, and the self-pity, I did some clear thinking. This wasn’t new territory for me. I’d faced dire prognoses before. He’ll never walk. He’s as good as dead. Say your goodbyes now.

Then came a voice inside, this one more strident: You defeated polio once. Be determined to do it again.

But how? I asked.

The same way you defeated it the first time, said a trusted friend and one of the most able-bodied guys I know. He had a plan, said he knew what to do. It was pretty darn simple. Maybe that’s why I had doubts. His remedy was not only quick (Give me 10 weeks, that’s all I ask), it flew in the face of medical knowledge, against the collective voice of neurologists telling me to make peace with my predicament, accept my fate. But then again, that was true of the first plan, the one conceived all those years ago by another able-bodied, well-meaning soul. She had been laughed off the stage, snickered at by those who knew better, but hers had been the plan that worked. It handed me my badge of courage: I faced down childhood paralysis and won.

I guess you might say these thoughts brought me to my epiphany moment. I saw my life had come full circle. I stood at the same crossroads as my parents: Accept illness as fate or fight with every ounce of hope?

Put that way, for me, there was only one answer. I had no idea if the fight was still in me, but how could I not try?

1

1941

It was a year for headline-making news in America and throughout the world. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in to his third term. Nazi armies were trampling through national borders in Europe. A new threat from the East lay waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

For my parents, Walter and Lilyan Greenfield, December 5th turned out to be a glorious day. Their first child, an eight-pound bundle of joy, was born. My delivery was normal in every way.

Two days later, thousands of American soldiers stationed in Pearl Harbor would be awakened by the relentless shower of Japanese bombs. That same week, in Europe, Hitler declared war on the United States, and FDR would soon respond with a declaration of his own.

With newspaper headlines warning Americans that their lives were about to change forever, my parents wrapped me up and took me home to their lower-level garden apartment in Irvington, New Jersey, which borders Newark, the largest city in the state.

My parents put aside the chaos around them. They were at peace as the world marched into war. In the following years, my dad would make military weapons at home, where he could happily witness every normal newborn milestone I reached.

In time, my parents were again blessed. My sister, Jane, was born two years later. Their little family was now complete. The war would start to wind down, and life for the Greenfields would settle into an easy routine of work, family get-togethers, and leisurely weekends at the lake.

But history teaches us that life has a way of changing in a flash.

When I sat down to write this book, I could not overlook the proximity between my birth and a day of terror for the thousands of Americans stationed at Pearl Harbor. Just as those sober-minded men were caught off guard, my unassuming and wide-eyed parents were as yet unaware of the personal tragedy that, in two short years, was about to strike them.

2

AFFLICTION

As infectious diseases go, the poliovirus is small, measuring 30 nanometers, less than one third the size of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, less than half the width of a strand of human hair.

Relatively simple in composition, polio was not visible to the human eye until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s. Years before, in 1908, the Viennese research team of Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper infected monkeys with polio by injecting them with spinal cord fluid taken from a polio patient, thus proving for the first time that polio is a virus.

In 1916, a polio epidemic ripped through immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York. A worldwide quest for a vaccine to stop the spread of this paralysis-inducing disease got underway. The virus was known to enter the body through the mouth after contact with fecal waste— thus the public health admonitions after World War I to wash hands after bathroom use and avoid swimming in communal pools and lakes.

But in 1944, the virus was still sweeping through America’s neighborhoods. It would be another eight years before Jonas Salk started his experiments with an inactivated polio vaccine and another three years before Salk’s vaccine would be licensed.

In the meantime, between 1944 and 1955, the virus would paralyze 369,904 Americans and cause 20,368 deaths.

***

I was two-and-a-half years old on that morning in the summer of 1944 when my mom came to wake me and I could not get out of bed. I tried to explain that my arms, legs, and back were hurting. I could barely move. My mom had no idea what to make of it but instinctively knew something was wrong. She removed me from the bedroom I shared with my six-month-old sister, Jane, still asleep in her crib a few feet away.

What unfolded next was a scene that parents throughout the country had been warned of, the one they dreaded most. The family doctor at the bedside of a child with sudden symptoms: My neck is sore. My back hurts. I can’t move my legs.

Those were the days when physicians made house calls. Dr. Charles Binder took one look at me and put to rest any notion that this might be a case of child’s play. This boy is not faking, he said. This is real.

Things happened quickly after that. Within hours, I was admitted to the Essex County Isolation Hospital in Belleville, New Jersey. This midrise of stone and brick that sits atop a hill had for decades shielded residents in nearby communities from tuberculosis patients. By the 1920s, the hospital’s eight-story Children’s Center made room for an influx of polios like me.

It was at this hospital that my diagnosis was confirmed, and it could hardly have been more dire. Of the two known polio types—bulbar and paralytic—I was among the tiny percentage of victims who somehow managed to contract both.

On admission, I was in the acute stage of the disease. My chest muscles were rapidly losing their ability to move air into and out of my lungs. I was placed in an isolation ward— the preferred treatment for poliomyelitis in the 1940s—and fitted into an iron lung, a giant metal tube-like tank that is perhaps the most emblematic symbol of the virus. The iron lung encapsulated patients whose lungs were paralyzed and could not breathe on their own.

As I was writing this chapter, I came across a website devoted to the hospital’s former patients and their families. One man wrote that at the same time his mother was admitted for suspected polio infection, the staff was busy writing out her death certificate.

The expectations for me were no less bleak.

He will never sit, stand, or walk again, my parents were told. Make him a ward of the state. Go on with your lives as though he had never been born.

But they would not hear of it. We do not accept that our son’s fate is a foregone conclusion. We need you to handle his medical treatment. Leave the family concerns to us.

***

I have fragmented images of my stay at that hospital. I recall being alone in a room and looking through a large window. Mom and Dad were on the other side of a thick pane of glass. I was anxious about being separated from them. I was in pain and crying. But they did not come close; they did not try to comfort me. They would hand the nurse a toy, and when she gave it to me, Mom would burst into tears. I was unable to reach out to her, and she could not reach out and touch me.

Years later, my mom would fill me in on the details of my brief stay in the iron lung. I was wrapped in a sheet and kept in a flat position. Nurses wore rubber gloves when they had to spoon-feed me. There was no direct contact with human skin, which young children crave.

By some miracle, my condition improved. The bulbar component, which immobilized my lungs, resolved. I started breathing on my own and was pulled out of the iron lung.

Still paralyzed from the neck down, I wore an armor of braces extending down to my toes. There was no way to predict the course my affliction would take. Some patients overcame their paralysis in weeks or months. Multitudes never did.

Lucky for me, I was able to leave the hospital a lot sooner than my parents or even the doctors had expected. It started when the most mundane cleansing routine exploded into outright confusion. A nurse decided to give me a bath. She took me to a different area of the hospital. After wrapping me in a hammock and suspending me in a tub, she walked out of the room.

In the meantime, my parents had arrived for their