During Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, I am writing my columns on the themes of Advent. This week, I am taking the theme “joy”.
Because I write on the same themes each year, it becomes more and more difficult to find a new approach, so this year I’m getting personal, telling you stories from my life.
I was four years old when I became sick with polio. I remember my mother’s worried expression as she conferred with the doctor on the new telephone hanging from the wall in our farm home. It was spring and the roads were muddy as usual, but somehow my father was able to drive us to Tisdale in our green and white Desoto sedan. I had a terrible headache and I remember thinking it strange that the radiators in the doctor’s office were hissing. Later, I learned that the heat was turned off and the hissing was in my ears because of the fever.
Poliomyelitis is quite contagious so I was placed in a hospital room all by myself. The nurse asked if I wanted to sleep in a cot or a crib. Even though I was “a big girl now” I chose the crib. (When children are sick, they often regress.)
Because I was in isolation, my mother was not allowed to enter my hospital room. Instead, she sat in the hall and read to me whenever she was able to get into town, which wasn’t easy because my sister had just been born. I can imagine how torn my mother was between cheering up her eldest daughter and protecting the health of her youngest child.
I was alone in that room _at St. Therese Hospital for most of a month. The nuns and nurses tried their best to keep up my spirits but I think I did a lot of crying. I was used to a bedtime snack and they discovered that a white bread jam sandwich would bring a smile to my face. So that became my nightly repast.
Each evening a meditation was broadcast over the public address system. Although unfamiliar to me, the prayer and songs calmed and comforted me.
After almost three weeks of being alone in that room, another child was wheeled in one bright morning. The little boy also had polio, but was not too sick to play. We weren’t allowed out of our cribs, but the nurses gave us some old Eaton’s catalogues to cut up and we enjoyed throwing bits of paper at each other across the room. It was so much fun!
We weren’t even scolded for making such a mess. I think the nurses were just happy that we could be kids for a while. When I think of the word joy, that morning of play in the hospital is one of the images that first comes to mind.
After a month in hospital, I was sent home with no visible adverse effects from the dread disease.
Polio was epidemic in Saskatchewan in 1953 and 1954. Swimming pools were closed because they were thought to be places where children might catch the disease. Because I did not go to kindergarten or daycare, I think I cut polio at Sunday school.
The Salk vaccine against polio was introduced in 1954 and changed childhood forever. Children who had been vaccinated did not have to face the possibility of being crippled by poliomyelitis.
On my honeymoon in 1969 we stopped at a rehabilitation hospital in Winnipeg where my husband had been a summer employee a few years previous. We visited a woman who had been paralyzed by polio and lived out her life in an “iron lung”. Several other people in the ward also needed mechanical assistance to breathe. I left that rehab hospital feeling so blessed that I had not been crippled by polio as a child. The woman we visited was not without joy. In fact her name was Joy! She had learned to paint with a brush held in her mouth. She gave us one of her paintings as a wedding gift.
So often joy springs from the darkest times of life.
