Traveling without a Spare

Memories again, this time about something that happened over sixty years ago, the dreaded polio epidemic of 1949. I remember how all the parents warned us about overexerting ourselves, about swimming in the public pool, about coming in too close proximity to people. I guess that meant we shouldn’t have sex with anyone for fear we’d contract polio. Our parents would tell us anything to keep us from having sex. Back then, very little was known about polio, what caused it, how to prevent it, how medically to treat someone who had contracted it. I remember that awful summer when fourteen kids in a town of only about four thousand came down with polio of one degree or another. Fourteen. That’s like being in a negative lottery where you have a one in 285 chance of winning . . . or in this case, losing. Hateful odds. Of the fourteen, two died, and the rest survived but with varying degrees of infirmity. One of my classmates, Wenzel Leff, survived and went on to a successful career in medicine. However, starting in 1980, signs of post polio trauma began showing up, and from that time to the present, this trauma increased, mainly affecting his legs, an increase in pain, weakness, and fatigue. Last year, Dr. Leff decided to write a book, Traveling without a Spare, aimed at other post-polio people, a book in which he described his life with polio and all that he’d learned about the disease, about what other post-polio victims could do to combat the return of their evil demon, polio. It’s a very interesting read and I recommend it to any polio survivors or anyone else simply interested in this awful disease from the past. You could get a copy through Amazon or by going to www.travelingwithoutaspare.com. Do it. It’s a good read.