It was the summer of 1952 and our country was in the middle of its worst polio epidemic since 1916. Nearly 58,000 cases of polio were reported and more than 3,000 died. I was lucky.

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.

I’m remembering my mother; a beautiful, delicate unassuming person who brought me through my initial bout with Polio and the resulting rehabilitation and surgeries. Mothers of Polio survivors are unsung heroes.

Marty has overcome the difficulties of her physical limitations due to childhood Polio so that she can enjoy time on the water with her family.

“Late in the summer of 1952, a microscopic virus entered my body and changed my life forever . . .”

I contracted polio when I was 5. We lived in West Virginia, where there was only a small clinic. . .

Have you ever wondered? And really closed your eyes, If only for a moment, And thought of special times.

I contracted polio in Amarillo, Texas in October 1952, when I was 3 1/2 years old. No one in my family knows where I might have contracted the virus.

On June 8, 1953, Martha Lillard celebrated her fifth birthday with a party at an amusement park in Oklahoma. A little over a week later, she woke up with a sore throat and a pain in her neck.

On a hot January afternoon in 1946, the country doctor hurried from attending a polio case at a home in Cooma to the local hospital to deliver me.

A fear of the unknown. The need to maintain an appropriate distance. An urgent desire to find a cure or vaccine. They're the hallmarks of the coronavirus pandemic, but they also characterized an earlier epidemic: when paralysis-causing polio ravaged the U.S. in the 1940s and '50s.

One morning, shortly before my ninth birthday, I had trouble getting my shoes on, but eventually I did and went off to school with this thought from my mother - “If you have any trouble during school, go to the office”.

I wish my parents were alive right now so that I could hear all about the decisions they had to make, the fears they experienced and the trust they had in medical professionals when I was diagnosed at age two, with Poliomyelitis in 1950.