my aunt had polio. Our family was dirt poor. There was not a "choice" to isolate

[demtenjeep]

and everyone got the vaccine.



another thing fatnixon fucked up

[Rollo]

1. I remember standing in line at the town hall to drink the little paper cup of sugar water.

[Yonnie3]

2. I recall a drop of vaccine on a sugar cube.

[Igel]

9. Two doses.

I remember standing in line seemingly forever at the Baltimore national guard armory for what must have been dose 2.

[malaise]

16. Yep

I too remember

[OnlinePoker]

3. I got the small pox vaccine in 1971, 25 years after the disease had been eliminated in Canada. n/t

Last edited Sat Jul 10, 2021, 12:05 AM - Edit history (1)

[jpak]

7. My grandfather got smallpox at age 6

He was orphaned at age 4.

They put him in a pest house

Inverted coffin.

They gave him food and water, but he was there to live or die.

I can't imagine....

[Igel]

8. "Pest house."

Hadn't ever seen that word before.

Do have a copy of Camus' "La peste" on my bookshelf, tho'.

I also can't imagine what it was like. (Or even the relatively minor alternative, which left a pretty obvious scar on my parents' arms from the smallpox inoculation.)

[jpak]

10. We all had the smallpox scar for many years

And were glad to have it.

[Maru Kitteh]

12. I still carry my smallpox scar on my right upper arm.

I had to have been among the last in the lower 48.

[Hekate]

4. My friend was 2 years old when her mommy died of polio. Every school had its share of...

…crippled children — but if you survived polio and could not climb stairs, you couldn’t go to school with the rest of us kids.

Parents lived in fear of this disease. They lined up around the block to make sure their children got vaccinated: once for the needle and once for the sugar cube.

I feel sorry for the current generation of mothers who are anti-vaxxers — they are being lied to and are so woefully ignorant they can’t tell.

[Grasswire2]

5. My former husband had polio as a child.

He was six, I think. He caught it in the neighbor's swimming pool, the doctors said. His mother was an R.N., and she lived with the pain of him suffering with the disease that he caught in such a simple way despite her medical background.

He was put in an iron lung. The only reason he survived, is that he decided for himself to breathe AGAINST the machine instead of with it. And that strengthened his lungs. After he was out of the machine but still in the ward, he would get out of bed at night and walk around and around his bed to gain strength.

And so he lived to a ripe old age, but he did die with post-polio syndrome and was in a wheelchair in the latter years of his life.

[Warpy]

6. I'm old enough to remember "quarantine" signs on doors

and sneaking around the house to talk to friends through the windows. In some places we lived, groceries would deliver and run a tab. In others, neighbors had to help out since that sign on the door meant nobody went in or out. Vaccines for diphtheria, whooping cough and smallpox were out, but that was about it.

People just didn't know how to do it any more last year. I think it was a pretty steep learning curve.

[PlanetBev]

11. When I was a year old, my mother got polio

It was 1951 in the San Fernando Valley part of Los Angeles. The outbreak of ‘51-‘52 was considered the worst in US history. My sister told me that someone died down the street and someone else ended up in an iron lung. My mother was in the hospital but walked out under her own power fourteen months later.

Forty years later I met a woman who was my age and got it when she was a baby. She had braces on her legs and was on crutches. I will be forever grateful that I didn’t get it.

I could kill these anti-vaxxers with a smile on my face. The Salk vaccine didn’t come out until 1954-55. What people would have done to have it available in 1951.

[susanr516]

13. I was young, but I clearly remember waiting in a long line

to get the polio vaccine. They gave me a sugar cube! That was SO much better that getting a shot.

I was born in 1954. I don't know when or where I saw it, but I clearly remember seeing someone in an iron lung. I was terrified. There was a mirror above the head of the person inside, so they could see what was going on inside the room. I had nightmares about that.

[pansypoo53219]

14. 1 of my grandfather's 8 sibling got TB or polio + she was basically disappeared from the family.

[Hekate]

15. Might have gone to a TB sanitarium. Some recovered. Regardless, those hospitals...

… kept TB patients isolated and prevented them from infecting their entire family.