Janice was the Lancaster County Poster Girl for the March of Dimes in 1955.
PPS: Post Polio Syndrome
Fifty years ago the largest outbreak of infantile paralysis, or polio, in recorded history struck the United States and Lancaster County was not immune. Iron lungs were set up in all of the hospitals and the most seriously struck patients began a life, on their back, inside what looked like a toppled over water heater with windows.
The following year my sister, Janice, would be diagnosed with the disease and all of our lives would change. She was a first grader and I was in third. Dr. Art Griswold came to the house and poked and prodded and listened until he took my parents aside and told them he thought it was polio. I remember being quarantined and that the books I had brought home from school could not be taken back.
Janice was taken to Lancaster General Hospital for further diagnosis and I was shot in my butt with about 10 pounds of gamma-globulin (a fix-all medicine and the only preventive treatment then available). I went home and back to school and a somewhat normal life, but my sister was taken to Elizabethtown.
The Crippled Children’s Hospital was located State Route 230 west of Elizabethtown on a hill in a wooded area. It was a beautiful setting but for me it was depressing because my sister was inside and I couldn’t visit her. I had to wave at her from outside and to be honest, I really never saw her in the second story window that she was taken to in order to wave back.
We have pictures of a little Janice on her back while nurses applied hot packs to her legs trying to improve the circulation and keep the muscle from deteriorating. They really didn’t know what to do or how to cure it—they still don’t. Within a couple of years of Janice’s contracting the debilitating disease Dr. Jonas Salk invented a vaccine and soon after that Dr. Sabin came up with an oral version. Within five years the scourge of polio disappeared from the medical lexicon of the United States. Even the March of Dimes had to find a new cause—fighting birth defects.
My parents supported the work of the March of Dimes to the point that they appeared on a UHF television game show to raise money for the organization. Very few people saw it since very few people had television sets that went beyond the channel 13 VHF range. In a way that was fortunate as I recall my parents didn’t do well—both are very smart people but, like me, their recall isn’t instant, and that is what makes a good game show participant. Mom was the Lititz chair lady for “Mothers’ March--Porch Lights on to Fight Polio”.
Janice was the Lancaster County Poster Girl for the March of Dimes in 1955.
Half a century has passed since those days and, thanks to “Polio Plus” a project begun by Rotary Clubs a decade ago, the whole world is essentially polio-free.
But there is now a new threat—to those who have previously contracted the extinct disease—PPS. Post Polio Syndrome is making life miserable for the survivors of the disease. (Click here for more information.) It is making even those who escaped the iron lungs and the braces on their legs into invalids. Janice, in her mid 50s now, is forced to get around on a scooter, but it has not captured her spirit. She and husband John have traveled to Europe to visit their son Glenn, a sailor stationed in Italy and to the West Coast to visit their other two sons, Mark and Randy, both also sailors.
My sister never ceases to amaze me.
© 2002 JKH