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Polio is gone but not quite forgotten

Survivors are still stuggling with once-dreaded disease.


Frank Cheatham was not quite two years old when he contracted polio.

The disease paralyzed both legs but "It didn't defeat me," the retired Superior Court judge said firmly. "It just slowed me down."

Sitting tall in a black wheelchair, the white-haired jurist, now 79, described his battle with polio to 30 men and women, members of the Coastal Empire Polio Survivors' Association. Some of them walked with crutches, sat in wheelchairs or glided silently across the room on electric scooters.

The highly contagious viral infection has been called infantile paralysis and poliomyelitis; it caused fever, headache, vomiting, often, severe muscle weakness, paralysis and even death.

The disease has been around for thousands of years, but in 1916, a polio epidemic swept New York City, killing 6,000 people and disabling 27,000 more. Epidemics continued, with 4,167 polio cases reported in 1942 and 58,000 in 1952.

The spread of polio was halted in 1954 with an injected vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk. By the late 1950s, Dr. Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine that was easier to administer. Polio is now considered eradicated in the U.S and most of the world.

The disease isn't ancient history to Chatham County's polio survivors. For many of them, some of the muscle weakness and extreme fatigue that accompanied the initial disease has returned.

Called "late effects" or "post-polio syndrome," the symptoms returned ten years ago for Savannah speech pathologist Cheryl Brackin.She quit using braces at age 10, but now has to wear a hip-to-ankle metal brace and do stretching exercises to preserve her strength.

A lot of people, including doctors, know hardly anything about polio survivors, Brackin said.

"They think we're all dead," she said. "But we are coping."She joined with three other polio survivors, Shirley Carnell, Lila Mae Kicklighter and Lorraine Frew, to share information about living with polio. In April, 1997, they started the polio survivors' group which now attracts 20 to 30 members to its monthly meetings but includes as many as 100 "polios" in this region.

Some of their stories

Frank Cheatham's parents knew he was sick because he wouldn't stop crying.

It was October, 1925. He was 21 months old -- too young to talk.

About two weeks later his parents discovered he couldn't walk. It turned out the baby had polio.

After the illness passed, Cheatham was still paralyzed. He was fitted with braces on both legs.

And from 1933 to 1938, he spent summers at the Warm Springs Foundation, the rehabilitation center founded by President Roosevelt, (Renamed, it's now the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation.) There he had surgery just about every summer. Then he spent weeks recovering and he received therapy in one of center's three pools.

And at Warm Springs, he met the President.

He watched as President Roosevelt arrived at the Warm Springs train station and walked down a ramp in his braces.

He also watched as, using hand controls, Roosevelt drove a 1933 Ford convertible to the small, white house where he stayed.

Once, Cheatham and his family got a private audience with the president; his father an amateur artist, had drawn a portrait of Roosevelt. The president liked it -- and he and Mrs. Roosevelt signed it.

Another time once when Cheatham was in bed recovering from surgery, Roosevelt came to his room and chatted with him for a while. In the next room, he talked to a girl about her stamp collection and "one week later, she received a bag full of stamps from the President," Cheatham said.

When Cheatham was nine, he and all the Warm Springs patients attended Thanksgiving Dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt in the foundation's Georgia Hall.

After the newsreel cameramen left, "one of his bodyguards locked the President's braces and helped him to his feet," Cheatham recalled "He was six-foot one. He filled up the door frame. And he shook hands with every one of us."

Cheatham didn't understand what Roosevelt was doing at the time, but in retrospect, he believes "he was sending us a message. He was saying, 'Look at me. See the extent of my handicap. And yes, I'm President of the most powerful nation in the world. If I can be that, what can you be?' "

This was "the Roosevelt spirit: I'm going to lick the problem," Cheatham said.And Cheatham took that message to heart.

Throughout his life, he's never believed he had a handicap.

For years, he got around fine using crutches.

A couple of years ago, after a fall, he started using the wheelchair. But he doesn't believe this is post-polio syndrome. Rather, Cheatham said, "I think I have old age."

loomingdale resident Dot Parkhurst had polio in 1945, when she was five.

She doesn't remember much about it. But she does recall that she was quarantined in an upstairs room at her family home in Metter.

She was the fourth child in a family of ten children but for at least three weeks, she only saw two people: her grandmother who took care of her and the family doctor who visited every day to give her a shot.

When the fever and pain finally passed, her legs were paralyzed.

Her family wasn't wealthy and couldn't afford to send her to a fancy rehabilitation center. So her mother did therapy with her. "She tried to make me move my legs. And they tried to make me jump rope," Parkhurst recalled.

After a year, Parkhurst could walk again.

But she had missed a lot during her bout with polio -- all of first grade, for instance.

Decades later, Parkhurst's life has changed. She raised four children and now boasts eight grandchildren and one great grandchild.

But polio continues to affect her. She's had symptoms of post-polio syndrome. Her neck hurts a lot. Sometimes, she can't move her arms, she said. And "my legs get weak all the time. When she squats low to pick up something, "I can't get back up."'

The polio survivors group has helped her learn more about the disease. "You learn what your limits are," she said.

hen Cheryl Brackin was two years old, she was ill with what her pediatrician said was a cold.

But a week later, Brackin's mother lifted her out of her crib and tried to put her in a standing position. "And I collapsed to the floor," Brackin recounted.

Her mother knew what immediately what it was. "'We have a case of polio," she told Brackin's father.

Brackin spent the next six weeks in Atlanta hospitals. She was discharged with braces on both legs and a small wheelchair to ride in. At the time, a skeptical nurse remarked that the little girl "would be lucky to walk within five years."

But her mother was determined to help Brackin walk. She did stretching exercises with the little girl and, following the advice of Sister Elizabeth Kenney, an Australian nurse who became an international leader in polio rehabilitation, she placed warm wool cloths on Brackin's legs.

The little girl walked within eight months, but she still needed the braces for many years.

And every three months, she visited the rehabilitation center in Warm Springs where doctors checked her progress and fitted the growing girl with new braces.

While new braces were made, Brackin and her mother looked around the picturesque town and stopped at the drug store to buy ice cream sodas--and new Golden books for Brackin to read.

At age 10, she walked again.

But about ten years ago, at age 42, some of the effects of polio returned. She was with her mother on a very cold day and "Suddenly I couldn't walk."

So Brackin is back in a metal leg brace now. As she walks or works with children on speech therapy, the device of hinged chrome is barely visible beneath a long skirt.

Brackin is thankful that she can still hold a fulltime job but she tires easily. On weekends, she can go to the mall but instead of spending a full day shopping, "I can visit one store and not stay too long," Brackin said.She's also become an activist, working with other "polios" to learn about the long-term effects of their disease.

With the survivors' group, she circulates packets of information about polio, helps schedule speakers for the monthly meetings and offers other polio survivors lists of physicians in Atlanta, Warm Springs and Albany -- none from Savannah -- who are expert in the care of polio survivors.

Her effort, she said, is "to conserve and preserve" as much mobility for herself and others as she can.

"We are coping with the late effects" of polio, Brackin said. "But they are changing the lives of everyone."

Polio history timeline

*For centuries, epidemics of polio used to swept through the U.S., killing or paralyzing thousands of people every year.In 1916, in New York City, 6,000 people died of polio and another 27,000 were disabled by the disease.

*Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921

*Roosevelt began to visit a Georgia spa, Warm Springs, for therapy in 1924.

*In early 1930s, a nationwide crusade against polio began at the Warm Springs Foundation. A "first birthday ball" at Warm Springs sponsored by Roosevelt raised $1 million dollars to fight polio.

*1930s A machine called the iron lung kept polio patients alive, breathing for them when they weren't able to breathe on their own

*1935, vaccine trials of 17,000 children began but 12 of those children contracted polio and six died.

*In January, 1938, Roosevelt established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Comedian Eddie Cantor coined the phrase, "the March of Dimes " and in a radio appeal, asked for dimes to be sent directly to the White House. That appeal brought in 2.8 million dimes. (In 1979, The National Foundation changed its name to the March of Dimes.)

*In 1940, Australian nurse, Sister Elizabeth Kenney, toured the U.S. and Canada, showing off new rehabilitation techniques for polio victims. She advocated placing hot packs on muscles in spasm and "re-educating" paralyzed muscles by stretching them every day

*1952 Dr. Salk tests a vaccine that uses killed polio virus on monkeys

*In 1954, nearly two million children participate in trials of the Salk vaccine

*1955--The Salk killed-virus vaccine is declared 80 percent effective and safe. Over the next four years, some 450 million doses of vaccine are administered.

*1957--Dr. Albert Sabin conducts vaccine field trials in the USSR and Eastern Europe

*1962--Dr. Sabin develops and licenses an oral polio vaccine using live virus.

*1957--Dr. Sabin conducts vaccine field trials in the USSR and Eastern Europe

*By June, 1960, Sabin's vaccine had been given to more than 50 million people around the world including in the U.S., Soviet Union, China and United Kingdom

*By the 1970s, one out of every five infants in the world were routinely immunized

*1991 The last case of polio thought to have occurred naturally was in Peru

*2005--The World Health Organization is hoping for a polio-free world by this year. For now, polio still occurs in parts of Africa and south Asia.

The World Health Organization estimates up to 20 million survivors of polio are alive today. Of the one million polio survivors in the U.S., 450,000 show effects of permanent paralysis ranging from unequal leg lengths to paralysis of breathing muscles. An estimated 120,000 to 180,000 polio survivors may have post-polio syndrome including weakness and orthopedic problems

Source: International Polio Network http://www.post-polio.org/

And http://www.pbs.org/storyofpolio

The Coastal Empire Polio Survivors Association meets again at 10:30 a.m. June 28 on the second floor of Candler Hospital's Heart & Lung Building,

5356 Reynolds.

For information, contact president Beverly Jarvis at 925-3628.

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