Anyone here remember the polio scares when you were a kid?

[bobbieinok]

They closed the swimming pools.

Many parents would not let their children play outside in the heat.

One year a girl down the block got polio. Boy, was everyone scared.

[MuseRider]

1. I do have slight

recall of that time. I got the sugar cube, I remember that but I also remember not being able to go places and knew several kids and one of their mothers who got polio. I was really too young to get all upset over it, I did not quite understand until I was a bit older.

[histohoney]

2. My only memory

is of standing in line for what felt like hours at my local elementary school with hundreds of other kids waiting for my sugar cubes (this is how the administered the oral dose). Did I just date my self?:o

[TrogL]

9. I remember that too

Tuburculosis was also big. They'd have mass innoculations and a big truck parked out back with a nasty x-ray machine.

[LuLu550]

15. I remember the shots.

My older brother was one of hundreds of NYC kids who were part of the test study. My mom has a certificate thanking her and him for his "service' to the country.

[hedda_foil]

3. The parents were terrified and the kids were too.

It's one of my earliest memories. A child in my apartment building was paralyzed. No one went swimming or gathered in large groups. And the parents couldn't keep their fear from the little ones.

[5thGenDemocrat]

4. My mom contracted polio as a kid

It was a minor case, but it screwed her back up and she always had pain for the rest of her life. As for me (born 1956), I just remember Dr. Roggin, two nurses and my mom having to hold me down for the shots. I HATED polio shots.
John
Still, it beat the alternative.

[kcwayne]

5. Yeah, cause I was the scare

I caught the virus as a 6 month old, and it left me with a slightly deformed foot.

I remember going for therapy in heated swimming pools with tons of kids that were really afflicted by it. And I remember being around the iron lungs at therapy sessions, though I didn't have to use them.

I also remember being a case study at New York City Hospital, where they rolled me into an amphitheater to show a bunch of doctors what they were planning to do to me in surgery. Gave me nightmares for 10 years after that, similar to the kinds of things you see on the alien abductee stories.

When I had the surgery I was in the hospital for 9 weeks, and remember having wheelchair races that drove the nurses nuts.

It was one of the greatest days of my life when I could quit using the leg brace I had to walk.

I was one of the lucky ones that didn't have catastrophic deterioration.

[nostamj]

6. sugar cubes

1st grade, maybe even kindergarten... that's all.

there was one boy (older) who had scarlet fever. we would see him looking out his window. we always walked on the opposite side of the street....

[greatauntoftriplets]

7. I had bad tonsils and was fairly sickly for a time.

My mother was absolutely paranoid about my potential to catch polio. As a result, I did not learn to swim when my friends did, but had to wait until after my mother had virtually blackmailed the doctor into taking the damned tonsils out. She was right, and the doctor later admitted it.

[OneBlueSky]

8. I actually remember lining up in the school nurse's office . . .

to get the very first Salk vaccine when it was first introduced . . . being deathly afraid of shots at the time, it was a rather traumatic experience that I have never forgotten . . . that fear, btw, was forever conquered a few years back when I had to be on IV antibiotics round-the-clock for six weeks due to a staph infection . . . they poked me so many times that they finally ran out of acceptable veins . . .

[bubblesby2002]

10. Yeah I do

I wasn't supposed to play in mud puddles, but I did anyway. Lucky I guess, ever got polio. Also remember sugar cubes at school with polio vaccine on them. I CAN'T be that old can I?

[bubblesby2002]

11. On edit

I meant never got polio.

[silverlib]

12. sugar tubes and my puppy.

I remember lining up at school on a weekend to get my sugar cube. My mother was a nurse and one of the volunteers that handed them out, so she didn't have much time to watch me. I ate half the cube and stuck the other half in my pocket to take to my puppy so she wouldn't get polio. I always wondered if I got enough of the vaccine to do any good.

[Spirochete]

13. I remember

I had to get a whole series of polio shots, and i hated them. Then my mother still wouldn't let me go swimming in most bodies of water, saying i could get polio.
"Then what were all those painful shots for, mom?"

[LuLu550]

14. we avoided all outside water

even rain puddles. We actually called any standing water "polio water."

[Mrs. Venation]

16. Yes, I Remember

It was also called "infantile paralysis." I remember getting polio shots at the local health department; my mom had my two brothers and I in tow and we screamed bloody murder. I can also remember seeing children in iron lungs in the hospital when I had my tonsils removed (this was in 1955).

I was older when the Sabin oral vaccine was developed. The oral vaccine was distributed at the elementary school in my home town, and I don't think many people there refused it.

[HereSince1628]

17. Yes, I do, and I went to school with kids who survived it.

Here in Wisconsin, Waukesha a suburb of Milwaukee was once known as the City of Springs, people actually came "to take the waters"

There are a number of spring houses still standing in parks completely boarded up.

[elfin]

18. Oh, Yes

We were more fortunate than most - could leave for a cottage in a sparsely populated area during the summer.

Although I did not have any friends afflicted, my husband's brother got it and is suffering today from the after effects.

It was terrifying. This was also when we used to hop under our desks for A Bomb alarm practices - which even then I thought were a joke. But polio was no joke.

The fact that it is returning in parts of Africa due to religious based suspicion that the shots are a western weapon against them is mind boggling.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. Yes, when I was four years old

I attended a birthday party for the son of one of my mother's friends. A couple of days later, he was diagnosed with polio. I think he ended up partially paralyzed in one leg.

I'm told that the pediatrician instructed my parents to keep me well-rested and pumped full of vitamins. It must have worked, because I never got polio.

I was hospitalized for pneumonia the following year. As I was recovering, a nurse took me around in a wheel chair to see the other children on the ward. I remember a little girl who was in an iron lung.

When I was in college, it struck me that everyone who showed the after-effects of polio was my age or older. The invention of polio vaccine was truly a benefit to humanity.