Audrey King
presented at FICCDAT Conference, Toronto, Canada, June 2011
I found my mother's diary recently – the one she kept during the 1950s when we were an Army family living in England. She’ll be 100 in 8 weeks. She lives with me, deaf, unable to walk & rapidly losing weight. She has dementia which roller coasters between inconsolable agitation and sleeping for days. During her lucid moments, she’s sweet – fascinatingly childlike – and still capable of the reciprocal love for everybody she has always had.
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∞ LEADERSHIP
Nancy Baldwin Carter, Omaha, Nebraska
QUESTION: "We have a number of new members as a result of the publicity our group got through the WE'RE STILL HERE! campaign. Several of the people who called expressed their fears, which I think we all have. How can we help members address their fears in a meaningful way?”
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Post-Polio Health, (Volume 31, Number 3) Summer 2015
QUESTION: Sixty years later I still live daily with anxiety stemming from hospital treatment, not abusive but certainly traumatic for a child. Do you have suggestions on how I can reduce the stress of this anxiety?
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"Promoting Positive Solutions," Post-Polio Health, Volume 28, Number 3, Dr. Stephanie T. Machell
Question: I found out I had polio when I was 55 years old. My mother’s explanation was that “the doctor told me not to tell anyone.” Can you help me understand why this was told to parents?
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From the series, Polio Survivors Ask, by Nancy Baldwin Carter, B.A, M.Ed.Psych, from Omaha, Nebraska, is a polio survivor, a writer, and is founder and former director of Nebraska Polio Survivors Association.
Q: Every now and then I get a feeling of sadness over losses that I associate with my aging with polio.
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Mary Navarre, OP
When Joan L. Headley, the Executive Director of the Post-Polio Health International, asked me to be on a panel of family members of polio survivors at the convention in St. Louis, I was hesitant to do so as it was, and still is, difficult to talk about my life with my sister who contracted polio at the age of 6 – and even more so to speak about her death four years ago at the age of 64.
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Sunny Roller
Her bright blue-eyed pre-kindergarten daughter lie flaccid in a hospital bed, almost completely paralyzed from polio. Now 60 years ago, that horrifying summer polio epidemic had swooped this young family into its vile clutches, never to fully let go during their generation. Devastated, Marj, her husband, Art, and their toddling one-year old son, Scotty somehow got a ride back and forth to the urban acute care hospital every day to see Sunny. It was 1952 and the couple didn’t even own their first car yet.
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Kathleen A. Navarre
My reaction to the film “A Paralyzing Fear” ran the gamut from objective film critic to the very personal reliving of a long repressed event that seemed to happen to someone else, or in another lifetime, but also clearly happened to me.
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Ernest W. Johnson, MD
Returning from 34 months in the southeast Pacific as a GI to my home in Akron, Ohio, I was entitled to four calendar years of a university education funded by the GI bill. I enrolled at The Ohio State University (OSU) and while rooming with a high school friend who was completing his last year of medical school, was given advice-- after joining him on several clinical rotations--to finish the pre-med requirements and use up the educational entitlement in medical school. I did!
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Anne K. Gross, PhD
On the evening of November 3, 1928, three year old Carol Rosenstiel, her braces hidden under her pant trousers, her wooden crutches digging into her underarms, stood on the platform of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, a huge suitcase by her side.
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