Albert Sabin letter in my file

I'm sure I've done this several times in the last 20 years (since I retired)--condensing and throwing away files, especially those related to work. Now I'm into personal things. Considering the news about the vaccines, it was interesting to find a copy of a letter I wrote in 1983 to Dr. Albert Sabin who developed the oral polio vaccine which was much easier for school children. (I had the Salk vaccine given at school).

"I will always be grateful that as a parent I didn't have to go through the worry my parents' generation suffered. In 1949, my cousin Jimmy died of polio and 3 weeks later my sister became ill with polio. Although she lived, now in middle age she is suffering many after affects of deterioration.

Thank you for your contribution to the health of the world."

I had seen a newspaper column by Bob Greene who reported that Dr. Sabin was paralyzed in a lot of pain and unable to walk and was confined to a hospital bed at the National Institutes of Health. Green thought letters from the public could cheer the 77 year old.

Maybe it worked, because he lived another decade. I read a NYT obituary for him today and was surprised to see many parallels to other viral diseases, and how he continued to work on this problem. He also worked on Sandfly fever, dengue fever, toxoplasmosis and encephalitis. He and Dr. Salk (credited for the polio vaccine injection with booster shots) had a rivalry.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0826.html

He denounced the Federal policy of vaccinating all adults against the Swine flu virus in 1976, which bore a strong chemical resemblance to the virus of 1918-1919. He spoke the truth as he saw it without diplomatic considerations and thus many government doors were closed to him even though he was a hero.

Comparing the polio epidemics and Covid19

I’ve been anti-shutdown for weeks, but I only saw this video today.  https://youtu.be/lGC5sGdz4kg  So it has had no influence on me.  I’ve watched how the people of Ohio have been led into complete submission while our small businesses have been destroyed. Big box and chains are open.  I watched our sensible, conservative Republican, Trump-supporting, Governor DeWine and his sidekick Dr. Amy, appear every day on TV always quietly oozing more fear and regulations.

If you’re old enough to remember the polio epidemic, the video makes a lot of sense.  I recall my cousin Jimmy Corbett who died in 1949 of polio, and the Kable children I think 4 of the 5 had it, but all survived. We had a big gathering of Corbetts at the John Corbett home (parents of Jimmy) because of visiting relatives from California.  We had a wonderful time and within days Jimmy was dead from polio and about a week later my sister Carol had it. We all were quarantined (in those days they quarantined the people most at risk to contract the disease not the entire country), but not the adults.  My father moved out of our home in Forreston and moved in with his parents in Mt. Morris so he could earn a living (novel idea for 2020)—all had been at that family dinner.  So why weren’t they afraid for the adults?  Immunity.  Most adults born in the late 19^th or early 20^th century had some immunity to polio, a disease that had been around for centuries. Whether it was improved sanitation (indoor plumbing) or something else, I don’t know, but children of the 1930s and 1940s were being struck down.  Some young adults did have it—like FDR, and I wonder if it was his somewhat pampered life (flush toilets) that created the vulnerability whereas my Dad used an outhouse and met his first flush toilet at 14 when he started high school in Polo, IL.

Our son Phil died a week ago and we’d been caring for him (no wife or children for a safety net) first in his home, then in ours as we began to wear out. Under normal circumstances, my 82 year old husband would have seen his own doctor as soon as he began to have breathing problems, but it was postponed due to our situation and because of the shut down/telemedicine.  He needed testing and that isn’t done on the phone. Eventually the squad took him to the ER when he realized he was exhausted walking to the neighbor’s to get ice cream we’d stored in her freezer. He was admitted, tested, and found to have some serious cardiac issues.  The hospital, the largest in Columbus, was virtually empty. Everything—heart, lung, knee, hip, brain—was postponed because of the pandemic scare.  And how many thousands and thousands either didn’t go to their doctor or weren’t diagnosed because of the focus and policies about Covid19? Even today, the death toll nationwide is higher than normal, and the bump isn’t due to Covid.  It’s probably due to people not going to the doctor when they should have—technically, we’d created a nation of uninsured.

I think our president has been misled and so have many of the governors. Whenever I hear the word “data” I mentally flag it.  Dr. Birx of the president’s task force often said, “the data show. . .” Data is not information, information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.”
With more sifting and examination the data are actually showing that over 90% of those who died had one of three, or all three—obesity, hypertension, or diabetes.  So meanwhile, reporters who think will probably not be sent to investigate and all the sheeple get are stupid memes about injecting Lysol.

If you’re too young to remember polio, think about how HIV/AIDS was misreported and politicized (still is) as a disease that all of us would get in the 1980s.  And that’s nonsense in service of an agenda.  It’s still isolated for the most part to gay and bisexual men and drug users, and it’s behavior, not homophobia that spreads it.

Happy Birthday, Carol

Happy 82nd birthday to my sister Carol who died in 1996 at 58. We still miss you. Photo is 1989 with her daughter and son. Last year we got to meet her great granddaughter who visited us at Lakeside with her grandparents. What a treat. Carol was the only one of my family with any fashion flair, and loved beautiful clothes, bright colors, stylish purses, shoes and jewelry. As an enterprising teen, she sold Avon products, and was one of the "number please" voices back when our home phone was 59-L. Although her primary career was in nursing with a degree from Goshen College, she did own a dress shop in Bradenton, FL, for large size women.
 
Never a snowflake, after high school graduation in 1955 Carol went into Brethren Volunteer Service and did incredible tasks for one so young, like doing church plant surveys in Denver, helping with clean up after flooding in Pennsylvania, teaching Sunday School and leading worship in Kentucky where she road horseback to services because there were no passable roads, and being a "healthy volunteer patient" aka guinea pig at NIH in Maryland. I wonder if she is one of the results cited in this article.  https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/about/news/newsletter/2007/oct07/newsletter.html  
She was a survivor of childhood bulbar polio in 1949 and struggled with many health issues, but cared for many as a home health nurse in her last years.

196 When doctors made house calls

I drove my husband to the doctor's office this morning and instead of the usual array of magazines to read while I waited, I found a nice book, "Medicine's Great Journey; one hundred years of healing" (1992). I had recently seen the cover photo someplace on the web--it's by W. E. Smith for Life Magazine in 1948 of a doctor in coat, tie and hat walking through the weeds to a rural home.

One of the last house calls I remember was in 1949, when a doctor who drove from Mt. Morris to our house in Forreston to see my ill sister, gave my parents the bad news that she might have polio. I have few tender memories of Dad, but I still see him carrying her, a good sized adolescent, wrapped in a blanket, out to the family car to be taken to the Freeport IL hospital. She survived the disease and therapy, and we were all quarantined. Dad couldn't return to our home after the sign was put on our house. Our library books had to be destroyed rather than returned. My school classmates wrote me letters which were brought to the house and left on the porch. Odd what children put away to remember.

She survived, but post polio syndrome returned to haunt her later years and contributed to her death from a diabetic stroke. I will blog about that in February, the anniversary.

A few weeks before her hospitalization in 1949, my cousin Jimmy had died of the same bulbar polio. We had all been at a Sunday afternoon family dinner together the day before he became ill. In my mind's eye Jimmy was the golden child--handsome, athletic, black curly hair, charming.

Two years ago I went back for a high school reunion and one of the guys, an all-sports athlete, and still an active golfer and little league coach, gave us a walk down memory lane of all the athletes that had come out of our little school. The two in our class who actually made careers out of it were women, and we had no organized, competitive sports for women in the 1950s.

In the course of that presentation he talked about Jimmy. How even at age 12, playing basketball and football, he was spectacular--everyone knew he had the potential to be a state champ. I was so shocked to hear his name--in my years at that school (I transferred there 2 years after his death) I'd never heard him mentioned. I suppose I thought only family remembered him. Odd what children put away to remember.