What's it like for a child to experience polio? My mom told me that I spent the first month in isolation at University Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was then transferred to Children's Hospital, Little Rock. I have no conscious memories of the actual illness, only of one or two dim scenes from the hospitals. But as an experiment for a Bible study, I wrote a "lament" from the point of view of a child. What came out is below.
The photo is of me a week before I came down with polio.
Caution: given the experience of this 2 1/2 year-old dealing with polio and its aftermath, it gets emotionally heavy...
This is a very personal lament by a young child, as heard by his adult self some 60+ years later.
Written for Week 8 of The Way of Grace, Companions in Christ in 2010 (PDF)
Postscript: Besides the direct experience of polio is this: one thing he didn't know, but is plainly referenced in this lament, was that the policy of the hospitals in 1948 was to limit visits by parents of children to one hour a WEEK! And of course, this is in addition to the one month of isolation because of the extreme infectiousness of polio.When my father questioned this, the answer was, "it makes the children easier to handle."
Update: last year (2022), I discovered the book, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, and in taking the time to read it, I finally identified the heavy, barely hidden feeling: I had felt abandoned! Heavy for sure--and attachment research has shown that most children go through a process of dealing with what is felt as abandonment. The consequences have lasted a lifetime. My autobiographical journey of self-discovery, healing, and resilience is being prepared for printing (2/2024) and is available here in PDF.