Boomers . . . and How They Got That Way
Epistle 17 – The Iron Lung
I just knew I had it. Polio, that is. No worse fate could befall a young person. I had seen plenty of newspaper pictures of kids in iron lungs to know. Imagine spending your life lying in a steel tank just so you could breathe. Horrible. Polio was the scourge of the earth before cancer was invented and I knew I had it. I just knew.
It was one of those hot, humid, summer nights in 1955 BAC (Before Air Conditioning) when you just rolled around on top of the sheets, sweatin’ like a butcher, without a wisp of air through the window screen. The lacy curtains hung there as dead as I was. Everything was lifeless. Even my brother, who’s twin bed was pushed up next to mine, was too inert to accidentally whomp me across the chest with his arm.
So there I lay, in the upstairs flat of the Bates Motel, our lodgings in the mid-50’s. With it’s porch roof posts leaning toward each other below the two blank 2nd floor windows, the place looked like the Scull and Crossbones. And behind one of those ghostly windows, I lay with a really stiff neck, unable to move my head in any direction. It was polio for sure . . . and I had it. Would they carry me downstairs to put me in the iron lung or bring it up to my bedside to gently lay me in it? Nah, probably make me walk to it somewhere with my head in a cast. It was a cruel time.
I suppose the cynics among you are thinking that by morning my stiff neck was gone as I merrily rode off on my bike in search of a sandlot baseball game (which is what we played before Little League was invented—honest). No, sir! We’re not talking about some shallow, tow-headed kid here. I had to go stand in line in the school gym—during summer vacation, for God’s sake—to receive my first Salk vaccine shot. As you all know by now, Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the vaccine to conquer polio and spare thousands of young people the torture of that terrible disease. It’s a shame he discovered it too late for me. True, my stiff neck was gone but I remembered it clearly and knew it was still just a matter of time. Who knows? Maybe I’d have a major attack right there during the shot. Maybe pass out even. Everyone knew that the vaccine itself was full of evil polio germs.
Well, as you may have guessed by now, I am fully recovered. I survived the shot plus a booster or two and even sampled the Sabine oral stuff. By some miracle, I narrowly escaped a brush with death and the inside of school during summer break. I could tell you more about the perils of growing up without national health care or air conditioning, but I need to sign off now. I have a stiff neck.
We Will Win
Filed under: Boomers . . . and How They Got That Way
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