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.

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.