Sister Kenny, Mortality, & Me
We are pleased to bring you a guest essay from noted author, Daniel M. Klein, about his experience surviving polio as a young boy in the early 1940s. In our time when the importance of vaccines is being questioned and so many people around us are not old enough to remember what it was like to live in an era before vaccines, we believe it is important to share these stories.
Sister Kenny, Mortality, & Me
By Daniel M. Klein
During the polio epidemic of the early 1940s, we were all in terror of the dreaded disease. It was alternatively called “infantile paralysis.”
That says it all. Wheelchairs for life or worse, a life in an iron lung.
At the age of 5, I saw it all from my crib in the Wilmington, Delaware hospital where I lived next to a boy slightly older than I was. It was pretty much the only life we knew. So we didn’t feel sorry for ourselves.
Indeed we didn’t have a well-developed sense of ‘self’ yet. If we did feel anything, it was the pain of hot towels the nurses flung on our backs every four hours, the Sister Kenny treatment for preventing paralysis. This turned out, of course, to be apocryphal. Nonetheless, it hurt. I would tremble with fear every time I heard the nurse approaching with the rolling machine containing the hot towels.
I just barely grasped that it was good for me. It would keep me from ending paralyzed, like the man in the iron lung down the hallway — wide awake, but unable to move. I knew enough to understand that I wanted to avoid that fate the best I could. Better to lie in my crib, hot towels and all, like a caged animal. Who cares? At least I am not in an iron lung. Aarghh, the very term, ‘iron lung’ gives me the shivers when I think of it now in old age.
I thank God I didn’t have to spend my life conscious in an iron lung. Some did.
The boy in the crib next to mine died. I didn’t realize he was dead until two men came in to wheel him away for burial, I imagine. Dead and gone. That was a new one for me. What happens next? The morgue. Heaven? Would he be missed? Would it be a relief to his loved ones in some way? Better dead than a life in an iron lung? Heaven was looking pretty good. Would my parents be relieved? Hard to say. My dad, the scientist, hardly believed in an afterlife. My older brother, Herb, who was coerced into hospital visits and window sightings, would certainly be relieved to have me gone, this skinny little brother, clutching his stuffed animals and looking forlorn. What a pity-monger. Either get better and come home or die already. I have my own life. Time goes on.
I hadn’t counted on the hospital keeping my stuffed animals and burying them after I was released, ‘cured’ of the dreaded infantile paralysis by the Kenny treatment. Lucky me. But what about my stuffed animals? I loved them. They were my best friends, my comfort. So, with the help of a little left-over hospital fuzzy headedness, I decided that in spirit the stuffed animals still existed, now in the attic above my room, looking over me.
That, of course, was too much for my brother. “They burned them,” he informed me. “They are ashes. Stop making up things. You are home, cured. So your stuffed animals had to be incinerated. It is to keep the disease from spreading. Just be grateful you got out of there in good shape.”
When my father heard what my brother said, he came in and slapped my brother. He didn’t cry. He knew he was right and right was right. Poor guy. He thought the ‘truth’ was holy.
Only a few years later, a vaccine against infantile paralysis arrived. The way vaccines work is getting rid of the dreaded disease for the entire population. It disappears so completely that after a while it is not needed any longer. The disease is gone. History. That is what happened to infantile paralysis. How fortunate for us.
Of course, other diseases appeared, like COVID. And other vaccinations appeared for that disease. But, for most people, COVID wasn’t even close to polio as a danger. That said, hundreds of thousands of people in the US died of COVID before the vaccine was available. Most of them were over 60, but the disease also ranked among the top causes of death among children at this time.
I have heard elderly people say, “I am not going to get the COVID vaccine. We spend too much time and money on end-of-life health care. Hey, everybody dies sometime. So spend the time and money on younger people who still have more living to do.” My own father believed that, even if he was too sick to make any decisions before that option appeared. Personally, I worked that out with my doctor. If I am on a breathing machine for several weeks, let me die in peace. Maybe just being made comfortable is a better choice. Better to do the paperwork on that when you still have your marbles.
But I get that not having the COVID vaccine is different than refusing end-of-life care. Without the vaccine, I could endanger other vulnerable people. I’m not going to do that.
It really is a shame that we cannot live forever, but there it is. Now, though, rather than raging against the dying of my machine, I try to relish each moment I have left. To be here now. Wittgenstein said that living fully in the present is to live in eternity. I like that.
Here I go. I don’t need a vaccination for that.
Daniel M. Klein
We are very grateful to Daniel Klein for describing his harrowing experience and how it has affected him for years afterward. Please share his deeply personal essay with others.
With his story, we join with Grandparents for Vaccines in their efforts to collect accounts from people who contracted diseases before there were vaccines. Their website also has a library of titles of books to share with children about vaccines, their history, and the scientists who developed them.
Therese (she/her/hers)
Judy (she/her/hers)
Didi (she/her/hers)
Leading Ladies Executive Team