One August day I was outside in front of our home playing hopscotch with some of the other girls in the neighborhood, when I realized I did not feel well. A few days later, my right arm was paralyzed.

One day I was an active 12-year-old riding my bike, playing baseball with my friends and climbing trees on my grandmother’s farm. The next day, I remember feeling bad, missing school and developing a limp.

I had just returned from a week’s vacation at Geneva on the Lake. I was almost eighteen years old and was embarking on a nursing career. While at home, I was preparing to start an “on the floor” study the on the following Monday. Three days prior, I started having a weird sensation on my skin.

Carol was only two when she had the "summer flu“. She got better on her own, no doctor was ever called. Finally, at 90 years of age, her mother revealed that deep down, they always knew it was polio.

The hospital was "overwhelmed" with polio patients. His parents were told to take him home, live in quarantine and do the best they could. Survivor Jim Smith

When I was seven months old, my Mother and Daddy noticed my runny nose and how much I was falling when I was trying to hold onto furniture and pull myself up. By the time the tests were completed, I couldn’t stand at all.

I’m talking about an old-fashioned winter like when I was a kid in the 1950s. The snow started after Thanksgiving and it snowed ’til the end of February.

It was a very hot day. When they passed Logan Circle she let him play in the water fountain. That’s the day they believe he caught polio. The next day, they blocked off the entire area.

In order to get away from Trenton, NJ, which was experiencing a terrible epidemic of polio, Sally’s cousins had rented a house while their husbands were overseas. However, she and two of her younger cousins got sick, and Sally had to be driven home.

I came down with a high fever and a stiff neck. Mom called our doctor. The next thing I knew, I was alone in an ambulance bound for a hospital at the other end of the county.

As an active 10 year old, living in a tight knit community in East Detroit, Roger enjoyed the summer of 1947 playing with his friends in the neighborhood. Soon the summer fun came to a harsh end with the spread of polio.

In 1949, the year I was hit by the poliovirus, 42,000 cases of polio were reported in the United States and 2,720 people died, most of them children.

During that first year of the Salk vaccine, there was a shortage of polio vaccine in northern Wisconsin and they decided to give it only to children going to school. That was a good public health decision, but a bad one for me.

“You’re OK but your feet don’t match”, my future husband jokingly said to me as he was walking me home from our first meeting.

Ross Reynolds speaks with polio survivor and post-polio syndrome sufferer Kathy Parrish about her experience as a child with polio and the lasting impacts of the disease.

Kiwi parents who question the need to vaccinate their children need to know that the crippling disease poliomyelitis, commonly known as polio, is “just a plane ride away.”