What is it like to have polio?
Richard Daggett
President, Polio Survivors Association
Read the article on it’s original source here.
I woke up one morning in 1953 with a very painful, stiff neck and back. I was thirteen years old, and I’d never known anything like this. I stayed in bed until mid-morning when my mother called my father at work. He came home and they took me to see Dr. Hershey at the Ross-Loos Clinic in Huntington Park. The doctor did some tests, mostly to do with my reflexes. He said I should be taken to the Los Angeles County General Hospital.
We arrived at County General and entered the Communicable Disease Ward. I was assigned a bed and they began giving me more tests. Every time a doctor came by he would ask me to try sitting up in bed without using my arms. This seemed to have some special significance. I did this about a dozen times and had no difficulty.
In the afternoon they did a spinal tap. They told me it was a test to see if I had polio. Everyone in the early 1950s had seen March of Dimes posters with iron lungs and kids with leg braces and crutches, but polio was not something I thought about much as a child. I didn’t think any more about polio than I did about getting hit by a truck. I don’t remember my parents making much of a fuss over it either.
The tap itself was very painful, but what hurt even more was trying to get in the knees-to-chin position that a tap required. They kept asking me to bend forward more but the pain in my back was really intense.
That night my legs began to ache, and shortly after midnight I started to have trouble sitting up. I needed to urinate and I could see a urinal on the nightstand next to my bed. I tried to reach for it but my arms wouldn’t cooperate. With great effort I finally reached it but I was completely exhausted.
I wasn’t sure how a person was supposed to feel if they had polio, but not being able to sit up told me I had it. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Uh-oh. I think I have it.” When my parents came to visit the next day I told them the same thing, “I think I have it.” I said it almost apologetically. I knew my parents didn’t want to hear this.
In the late evening they wheeled me into a small room where they started an IV. Then some people in surgical gowns wheeled me to another room that looked like a dentist’s office. Here they performed a tracheotomy.
A tracheotomy — without an “s” — is the name of the surgical procedure to open an airway in your trachea, or “windpipe.” A tracheostomy — with an “s” — is the incision left after the operation. I now have a tracheostomy, pronounced with a long “a.” Those of us familiar with tracheostomies usually refer to them as “trachs,” still pronounced with a long “a” and rhyming with cake.
The operation was performed with a local anesthetic. I was wide awake and I could watch the doctors bending over me as they worked. The one who seemed to be the leader wore goggles over his glasses because, he said, “It keeps the patient’s breath from fogging my glasses up.” There must have been several people present who were unfamiliar with the operation because the doctor with the goggles gave a running commentary. Everybody in the room obviously knew what they were doing to me. Everybody in the room but me!
Up until this time I had moments of apprehension but I was never really frightened. Of course I wondered what was happening but, except for the spinal tap, nothing that had been done was very painful and everybody acted like things were going fine. Then the doctor doing the tracheotomy made one final cut and air started sucking in and out of the hole he made in my windpipe. I thought he must have done something wrong. I tried to ask them what had happened but every time I tried to talk more air bubbled up out of the hole. Now I really was frightened.
When they finished the operation they put me in a tank respirator, more commonly known as an iron lung. As my head was sliding through the opening, I vomited. I tried to apologize but the words wouldn’t come out. And blood seemed to be all over the place. My blood!
I either passed out or they gave me a shot of something to make me sleep, because the next thing I remember was waking up in a large room. There was a mirror over my head, and in the mirror I could see a row of large black bellows across the room. They were going up and down. I didn’t know much about respirators but I figured one of them must be making me breathe. I tried to figure which one it was by timing my breathing with the motion of each bellows. None of them seemed to match my breathing pattern. It wasn’t until later in the day, when my mirror was adjusted upward, that I realized those bellows were all attached to the underside of other respirators. I couldn’t see mine because it was beneath me.
I was in a Drinker-Collins “iron lung.” The Drinker machines were bluish green and had the bellows on the bottom of the respirator. These were the most common type of tank respirator in Los Angeles County. The Emerson “iron lung” was a pale yellow, almost sickly color and had the bellows on the end. The Emerson machines were less sophisticated and cheaper to manufacture. They were more common in other parts of the country. Both types made a low whooshing sound as they worked to keep us breathing.
An iron lung helps a person breathe by creating a rhythmic negative pressure within the tank. This negative pressure creates a partial vacuum and the patient’s chest wall expands trying to fill this vacuum. When the chest expands the patient draws in air, mimicking natural breathing. The pressure and rate can vary for each patient. Those of us with significant paralysis of our breathing muscles often had additional air forced into our lungs through a tracheostomy. The tracheostomy can also be used to suction mucous from our lungs. I’m sure the tracheostomy saved my life.
After a few days I got used to the routine: two shots in the morning, one at noon, one at night. I had blood taken for tests every third day, usually out of my leg or groin. Ouch! Some people might think that if a person can’t move, then they can’t feel either. Let me clear that up right now. Polio does not affect your senses. You are able to feel everything. If something looks like it would be painful, it probably is painful!
I couldn’t swallow, so they inserted a tube through my nose and down into my stomach to feed me, and I still had the intravenous tube in my arm. Later they moved the IV to my leg. When they did this they performed what they called a, “cut down,” similar to what is now called a central line. They cut open a vein in my ankle and inserted the IV tube directly into the vein. That was one of the things that really hurt; both when it was opened and again when it was closed. I assume they must have used some local anesthetic but it sure didn’t feel like it.
My mother drove to the hospital to visit almost every afternoon and both parents came in the evening. I’m sure it was a difficult time for them. I was their youngest child, and I was very, very ill with bulbospinal polio, the most severe form of this disease. I learned later that, in addition to polio, I had a life-threatening case of pneumonia.
It was probably more difficult for all the parents. Imagine entering a room filled with these huge metal tanks. The tanks are making their whooshing sound. All you can see are heads sticking out one end of each tank, and you know that one of these heads belongs to your child.