When I was five years old and a victim of a polio epidemic, I found myself on the receiving end of steady streams of pretty flower arrangements in china animal vases, and prayers for healing. Not that these loving offerings softened my temper especially. In fact, in praying for my physical recovery my mother’s dear friends may have been adding fuel to the fury with which I hurled things at the teams of doctors gathering at my hospital bedside every morning.
At this distance of over five decades, it seems that these gifts and my bellicose reactions to events beyond my control were setting the stage for the way I would handle all kinds of things. You know -- the dishwasher’s pouring water all over the floor. Pause and consider the possible inner meanings of this event. Am I being tested for patience today because I came up short yesterday? Is this symbolic of an outpouring of blessings in some way I am not fathoming just now? In any event -- kick the blasted thing on the way for mops, and once again on the way back, for good measure. Computer keeps giving errors? Ponder this, am I having trouble with communications in general, real people communications in addition to the situation with this machine? No matter, let’s show the computer my five pound sledge and see if that begins to change its attitude!
My recovery from the childhood plague of paralytic polio was anything but even. There I was for the holidays of late 1953, lying in a cold metal bed at Boston’s famous Children’s Hospital, dressed in red flannel and with my long hair cut to shoulder length, getting my first love letter from the little boy in the bed across the ward. I sent it back to him in bewilderment the paper airplane way. I was five, he was six. The hospital people used to like to bring gigantic contraptions of tubes and cylinders to my bedside, requiring that I puff into them, trying to make something rise up to the top of a cylinder. The closer I got to the goal the louder they would cheer -- but I had no idea why grown people chose to amuse themselves in this manner. Other times they would bring me trays of hospital food, smacking their lips as though there was something wonderful hiding in the limp cereal and tasteless canned applesauce.
Since very little about my life there made sense to me in my red flannels, I decided to push the system and see what happened. Perhaps this was due to an infusion of prayerful power following a family visit. I took to tipping trays of untasted food off the edge of the bed. It wasn’t long before the staff wised up and quit putting their non-delectable offerings anywhere in my vicinity. No, I got my very own bedside assistant who would sit or stand there, trying not to glower as she worked harder and harder to shove spoonfuls of Cream of Wheat between my clenched teeth. Or to force bits of leathery hamburger into the side of my cheeks. None of this had much effect on me -- for days and days I stubbornly declined with charming wordless mannerisms to swallow any food whatever. Charming in the sense of thinking incantations to myself when spitting out whatever they managed to sneak in -- grinning evilly when I scored a direct hit on the assistant’s person.
In those days the families of children in long-term care facilities were allowed to visit for only a couple of hours, on weekends. There was nobody to reprove these appalling demonstrations of displeasure with my caretakers, so...
We had a pretty good standoff going for a while there. I would lie most days staring at the ceiling, blowing less and less enthusiastically into the tube contraption whenever it appeared, never even looking at my would be six-year-old swain across the ward. Sonny, he was called. The people who delivered the food trays about knocked their socks off doing little dances, singing happy songs about what yummy yummy hot dogs were coming Emmie’s way. Visions of splattering hotdogs against the white walls danced in my head with sufficient force to put an end to the singing and dancing. Eventually they stopped bringing food and merely inquired if I wanted anything. “Just water” was the normal response.
Eventually my body began to rebel at its foodless condition. Strange cravings began to plague me. When a dinner deliverer asked what I wanted, without a thought I said: “A big bowl of vanilla ice cream with mustard all over it!”
Was it a measure of that woman’s care or desperation that I had that amazing meal within minutes? Then got seconds?
After that act of cooperation on my part, the folks in the hospital practically whizzed me into the new long leg braces somebody had been making for me, picked me up out of my bed, off to the physiotherapy area of the hospital, and deposited me into a set of parallel bars. It was precisely the moment when I learned what it was like to have few working muscles south of my arms -- down like a rag doll. Again, again, again, again, again. There was a tall man on a nearby set of parallel bars, a man with grey hair, also in his first set of leg braces. His were buckled on over his trousers and looked very odd, indeed. His silly wife was fluttering around, clasping her hands to her big bosom, urging him to try for one more step. But I was most affected by the tears running down his face when he watched me falling.
About the time of the vanilla ice cream and mustard, I was becoming skeptical about people’s motives since much of what was done to me was as bizarre as nurses clapping their hands for a dumb show when a little girl blew into a tube. As my trust in people diminished during this period, my love for four footed furry creatures of my past life, rose in proportion. In fact, it is due to a couple of creatures -- imaginary, to boot -- that I came through these hospital adventures with as good an attitude as I did. One imaginary friend was a dog, the other a wild, pale mustang.
After my demonstration of how much falling a five year old can take before shattering the sound barrier with screaming, the nurses hauled me back to bed and took away the awful metal irons that were the braces. But not for long. The next morning saw the rag doll dumped onto the parallel bars again, and the sad man was there too. How I did not want to make him cry anymore! So I took a better hold on the bars with my hands, and did not fall so many times. In fact, from then on my progress was amazing!
I never saw the tall man again, but later on I sure hoped he’d had a happy life and that his distressed wife took good care of him. She would stick dollar bills, between his buttocks and tell him that if he would just squeeze them tight enough, he could have the money. Good trick for a set of paralyzed glutes.
Before the polio got me I never walked, I ran, I flew, I leaped everywhere I went. I was fearless, a tomboy, scuttling up a tree about as fast as the New England squirrels in the woods up back of our house. Long about the time parallel bars were introduced to me and my surviving arm muscles, this athleticism became a useful quality, indeed.
My doctor’s name was David Grice, and he was a bear man with a head of frizzy brown hair. The nurses always showed him a deep respect, so I called him Fuzzy. One day Fuzzy decided, as doctors in teaching hospitals are wont to do, that I was his prize patient and he determined to show me off before an auditorium filled with doctor colleagues of his.
He stood up on a big wooden platform and jawboned them for what was to me, sitting on an uncomfortable, enormous wooden chair, at least ten lifetimes. Then he asked me to join him up there. Slowly I plodded along with the leg braces and long wooden crutches, up a ramp until I stood by his side. Since all those doctors seated in tiers of bleachers were staring at me, I decided to let them study my back instead of my face. About that time Fuzzy was seized with a notion. “Emmie, I want you to kick me,” he mumbled to me, but to the assembly he rattled off a long list of muscles that were about to become involved in a display by little Emmie here. Before I had a chance to think much about what part of him to kick, he suddenly decided that his colleagues could better assess my musculature if he just whipped off the hospital johnny I was wearing. Now, in a modest New England family upbringing, one does not present a naked five year old girl to a room full of strange men.
Fuzzy presented a very pretty pink faced picture to his friends as he stood with my attire dangling from one finger and the imprint of my toes, encased in a buster brown shoe, on a delicate central part of his anatomy while I beat a hasty, modest retreat away from the sight of those howling men.
