Lorraine Inwood is 88 years old. She lives in Mosgiel, near Dunedin in New Zealand’s South Island. Sixty years ago, when she was pregnant with her fourth child, her eldest son became ill with a tummy upset. He vomited several times but soon recovered. Then Lorraine went down with the same bug. She quickly became so weak and feverish that she was unable to get out of bed.
The family doctor diagnosed pneumonia. He made at least three home visits, finally telling her, “You’re convalescing now. You should be up and about.”
There was no way that Lorraine could follow his advice. She had a vicious headache and awful back pain. Every time she tried to stand she vomited again. She could feel herself becoming progressively weaker. No matter how much she willed herself to stand up straight, her body refused to obey and she remained bent double, saggy as a sack. A specialist was consulted. He recognised the signs and symptoms immediately: Lorraine had polio. She was one of 1,485 New Zealanders who contracted the disease during the 1955-56 epidemic.
Lorraine was rushed to Dunedin Hospital in an ambulance, and admitted to an isolation ward. She is still haunted by the memory of an iron lung clattering somewhere nearby. Her own breathing was becoming very difficult, but she fought to keep herself awake, dragging in each breath with deliberate effort. She was terrified of being placed in a respirator, since it was well known that many people who went into an iron lung did not emerge alive. Lorraine intuitively understood that frightening as the clattering was, it would be even worse if the machine fell silent. She couldn’t take her ears off it.
Lorraine managed to avoid being placed in the lung. She remained in the isolation ward for a fortnight, lying on her back on a hard mattress with the soles of her feet positioned flat against a board. Hot packs were applied to her limbs, according to the Kenny method. She was 26 years old, pregnant, weak, scared, and sick with anxiety about her young children, the youngest of whom was only eight months old. No visitors were allowed. At any rate, her husband (a grocer) and children were similarly quarantined at home.
After a fortnight, Lorraine was moved to Houghton Ward, a geriatric ward which also accommodated polio patients during this epidemic. Lorraine remembers elderly folk in their beds on either side of the long open space, and a line of polio patients “down the middle”. She remained in Houghton Ward for a further six weeks, during which time hospital services were stretched to almost breaking point by the influx of polio patients. It was impossible to sleep at nights in the crowded ward, with some of the elderly patients calling out in distress, and nurses bustling from patient to patient. Lorraine herself received no further active treatment, no rehabilitation, information or advice. She considers herself extremely lucky that strength gradually returned to her limbs, and although her trunk muscles remained badly affected, she was able to teach herself to walk again. As a form of exercise and “for something to do”, she made it her business each day to freshen the flowers in the vases on the other patients’ lockers.
One day her aunt and husband brought the children to visit, pushing the youngest in a ‘sulky’ (pram). It was a joyous moment – Lorraine hadn’t seen her children in a month. She moved to scoop the baby from the pram, but could not begin to lift her. The realisation was devastating.
Just before Christmas, six weeks after being admitted to hospital, Lorraine was discharged. She walked into her home, still stooped and weak, but without calipers or crutches, a polio ‘cure’.
Like so many people affected by polio, Lorraine made a point of getting on with life, and as much as possible forgetting about her polio. After all, as June Opie had put it in her popular memoir Over My Dead Body, the big ‘blessing’ of polio was that once the acute infection was passed, a person was no longer ill:
Those are the blessings of polio: never to feel ill, never to go down hill, and never to have pain except at the very beginning. I never knew what I was going to do next, but I made up my mind that I should walk again and that I should accept, with a fair measure of equanimity, most of the things that happened between immobility and mobility.” – June Opie
Stoicism, combined with a fierce ‘can-do will-do’ attitude, permeates the life stories of many polio survivors. People even talk of a ‘polio personality’; for the rest of their lives, polio survivors tended to strive to meet, if not surpass, the expectations of others, working extraordinarily hard to pass as ‘normal’ and to draw as little attention as possible to the effects of polio. There was very little acknowledgement of the trauma these patients experienced, first with the acute illness and then as they adjusted to radically changed lives. And unfortunately, as survivors were to discover in the years that followed, it wasn’t true that there would be no further pain or deterioration in strength.
But in any case, there was no chance for Lorraine to contemplate what had happened and to reflect on what had changed, not with three small children and – from March the following year – a new baby to care for. Her husband Eric stepped up to the plate and was a huge support at home, while also working full time to earn the family income. He was her rock, then and thereafter. Lorraine recalls, too, the kindness of friends when she returned home from hospital. She is especially grateful for the help given to her after her baby was born by a Plunket nurse called Nurse Fitzgibbons, who recognised that Lorraine was struggling to cope. Other than Nurse Fitzgibbons (who became involved because of the new baby, not because of the polio), there was no ongoing support from the health system. Lorraine’s rehabilitation involved visiting the hospital’s orthotics department for the fitting of a spinal corset, which subsequently proved too uncomfortable and impractical to wear.
Lorraine boxed on, falling frequently, battling constant shortness of breath, trying to ignore chronic weakness, fatigue and musuclo-skeletal pain. Despite her best efforts, however, there were many times when she was simply overwhelmed with exhaustion. It’s only in her later years that Lorraine has had time to reflect on how polio affected her life and the lives of her husband and children. It bothers her a lot that she was unable to be the active and fully involved mother she wanted to be, even though she is well aware – now – that being ‘active and fully involved’ was never in fact a realistic goal:
I never fully recovered and was fighting against weakness all those years. It affected me socially. I couldn’t do what people expected me to do. You just seemed to be fighting weakness all the time. I was always trying to beat this thing, get stronger.”
These days, Lorraine is independently mobile with the help of a walking frame. She loves to play the piano, although back pain makes it hard to sit for very long. What kept her going in the tough times, and what keeps her going now? Three things, says Lorraine. The first, even 22 years after she was widowed, is Eric. The second is tending her small garden, which is dedicated to his memory. The third source of strength and solace has always been music:
I would not have survived without music in my life.”
Sue Wootton is a writer and former physiotherapist. She is working on her second novel, which is about a family whose lives were affected by polio. Sue is co-editor of Corpus.
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