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.

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 probably didn’t give much thought to my plain brown shoes in the beginning. I was just happy to be on my feet and walking.

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.

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.

Tough Cookies: Knowing what it takes to conquer polio, survivors refuse to crumble under a new threat.

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”.

Donahue is not the ‘woe is me’ type. If people ask him about his uneven gait, he usually just tells them he’d tripped over something the other day.

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.

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.

Today my six-year-old son, David, started karate*. To most parents, such an occasion would be one of many proud events in the growth of their child; however, for my wife, Kathy, and me it was much more.

Rome, 1950. I was twenty-two and had been traveling through Europe for six weeks with Carol, my college roommate. We had another month remaining before returning to the United States.

“We were healthy, rambunctious kids, our parents abided by every single public health recommendation to try and protect us and yet, when a virus wants to hit, it’s going to hit everywhere it wants to.”