Good to be King
By King Harris
You don’t remember much when you’re 5-years old but among the few memories I’ll never forget (other than Sheryl Adams biting my arm when we were in kindergarten, or riding a horse named Heliotrope in Duncan’s Ring, or getting stung by a bee at the Jackling’s pool), was waking up one winter’s morning in 1952 and asking my mom to take me to the bathroom, to which she replied, “Can’t you go by yourself? You’ve been doing it for three years now.”
When she came by a few minutes later, I was, according to her, standing in front of the toilet, shaking uncontrollably.
Somewhat alarmed but with presence of mind, she rushed me back to bed, told me not to move, and arranged an appointment with Dr. Williams later that morning. It didn’t take long for Dr. Williams to diagnose my condition.
Each time he asked me to walk towards him in his tiny square office I fell flat on my face. He looked at my mother and suggested, “Mrs. Harris, has it occurred to you that your son might have polio?”
The very thought must have sent shivers up my mother’s spine. Polio, or poliomyelitis, was the most feared and debilitating illness of the time. Its victims were mostly children. The virus attacked the nerves governing the muscles in the limbs and the muscles necessary for breathing. It paralyzed arms and legs, and forced many to live their lives in an iron lung machine.
At the height of the polio epidemic in 1952, the year I was infected, 60,000 cases were reported in this country. More than 3,000 died. It wasn’t long thereafter when Dr.’s Salk then Sabin introduced their polio vaccines, which put an end to the threat and spread of the dreaded disease in this country by 1979, but not worldwide.
This is why I appreciate the efforts of Cambria realtor, Bruce Howard, who along with other local Rotarians just returned last week from helping to inoculate hundreds of children in Nigeria, one of several major countries still prevalent with polio.
The goal of Howard’s group is to eradicate the disease completely. I hope that is what they accomplish, because I wouldn’t want any child to have to go through what I did. And I was one of the lucky ones.
Of course at first I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I thought I had the flu. What I do remember is that after seeing Dr. Williams, my mom and dad wrapped me in a blanket later that night and drove me 45 miles to Children’s Hospital in San Francisco.
No sooner than we got there I was given a spinal tap, where several nurses held me face down on a table while a doctor stabbed me in the middle of my back, not once, but twice, with a needle that must have been at least a foot long.
The next day I awoke on a small bed in a quarantined room. I couldn’t move from the neck down. That’s when I learned I had some kind of infantile paralysis, and that doctors would do what they could short of entombing me in an iron lung.
What they immediately recommended might not have been as frightening, but it was not a procedure I was looking forward to. Every afternoon at two, a nurse rolled into my room what looked like a cylindrical-shaped washing machine on wheels, full of boiling hot towels.
After first covering me with a rubber sheet, she laid steaming towels all over me. Over my screams she would tell me, “I know it hurts, honey, but we have to do it.” It was, at the time, all they could do.
The treatment went on for several weeks, but soon I was strong enough to be able to stand, although I needed support. I was to later learn how fortunate I was.
It seems I had a milder case of polio than many of the other children in the ward, kids my age who I could now see in other rooms through a window above my bed. I was in the hospital for a month, and in that time, I had few visitors but had acquired a corner full of toys, games, and stuffed animals, none of which I would be able to take home because of the quarantine (although one kind nurse let me smuggle out a Koala bear under my blanket on the wheelchair I rode to freedom). But though I was out of the hospital, my ordeal was far from over. I still could barely walk.
So every single day for the next six months, while I lay on the kitchen table, my mom would raise my legs to my head to stretch the muscles. I cried because it hurt. She cried because I cried.
But had it not been for those extremely painful exercises, and had it not been for my mother’s love, determination and caring, for which I’ll forever be grateful, I wouldn’t be walking today.
