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'I have a story to tell'
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| Janie Ginocchio/Daily Press Polio survivor Neva Anderson looks at family photographs recently at her home in Paragould. |
Polio survivor Neva Anderson lets go of the past
By Janie Ginocchio
jginocchio@paragoulddailypress.com
The first four years of Neva Anderson’s life was much like that of any other child growing up in a small farm community outside of Paragould in the 1940s. Her father raised cotton and corn; her mother managed the household, which included 17 children.
Anderson recalled in a recent interview that she was an active child in those days, playing cowboys and Indians with her siblings in the woods near their home.
“Mother wouldn’t allow us to stay inside and do nothing,” she said.
But in August 1949, when Anderson was 4 years old, her world would change drastically and without warning.
She remembers getting up one morning.
“I jumped out of bed and took a few steps,” she said. “Unexpectedly, my legs gave way and I fell.”
Her older sister Bonnie, who was in charge of getting her ready for the day, told her impatiently to get up, but Anderson couldn’t. She was paralyzed. Doctors in Paragould and Little Rock would later confirm she had contracted polio, a sometimes deadly virus that aroused fear and dread among parents and children at the time. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of History Web site, “polio was the most notorious disease of the 20th century until AIDS appeared.”
“It was devastating back then,” she said of polio. “One of my sisters said it (finding out about Anderson’s diagnosis) was like having a death in the family.”
Polio, also called infantile paralysis, attacks the central nervous system and symptoms manifest themselves with varying degrees of severity, For Anderson, she was paralyzed on her left side and back and was unable to sit up, stand or walk.
Anderson was sent to St. Vincent Hospital in Little Rock for treatment. While there, she underwent a series of treatments that would seem draconian to modern eyes.
She spent six weeks in quarantine at St. Vincent with other children stricken with polio, unable to see her family. The doctors and nurses kept the children at arm’s length and wore masks to protect themselves from contracting the virus, making the patients’ only interactions with them cold and impersonal, she said.
“At that time, medical research was still in the experimental stage relating to treatment for each level of damage the polio virus had inflicted upon each individual,” she wrote in an essay about her experiences. “For me, the years ahead proved to be a grueling succession of trial and error to find procedures, protocol and operations that worked. Some ideas worked; some did not, and some my father just said no to.”
One treatment she described was meant to shock the circulatory system into working normally. It involved being placed in a bathtub-like receptacle. A sheet was placed over her body and ice was poured over her to lower her body temperature. She was later removed from the ice bath and wrapped in hot blankets to raise her body temperature.
“This was an agonizing experience devoid of any compassion for or understanding of all that a four-year-old was feeling,” she wrote.
She recalled her time in the hospital as one marked by loneliness and anxiety.
“I was too young to understand what was going on or why leaving me in the hospital was for my benefit — I only understood I was alone,” she said.
She said there was a pretty girl in the bed beside her who was in an iron lung, a tank respirator that would pull air in and out of the lungs for patients whose chest muscles were paralyzed and unable to breathe on their own.
Anderson said she never learned the girl’s name, but they would talk to each other. Then one day, Anderson woke up and the girl was gone.
“No one would tell me what happened,” she said. “To me, looking back, she probably didn’t make it.”
After the quarantine period passed, she was allowed visits from her family. At the end of one visit, she begged her father and sister to take her home. He told her to watch from a window in the ward and wave to him as they left. Feeling the pain of separation yet again, Anderson became upset and began to beat on the window, screaming. The nurse ordered her to be wrapped tightly like a mummy, Anderson said.
“It was to protect my spine, but I didn’t understand that at the time,” she said.
After six months of treatments and physical therapy, Anderson was able to walk with the aid of crutches and a leg brace. She was finally allowed to go home.
A new set
of challenges
But going home didn’t mark the end of her recovery. She now had to learn to navigate the world with an atrophied left leg and the ever-present leg brace.
Anderson endured several surgeries throughout the rest of her childhood to correct problems in her left leg, which wasn’t growing at the same rate as her right. When the doctors suggested her right leg be shortened, her father refused, she said.
Despite the pain, she was determined to do what others could do physically.
Living with the effects of polio made “me have grit,” she said. “Maybe made me a little on the stubborn side. I didn’t want to be not able to do what everyone else did.”
But there were limits to what she could do. She recalled how she wasn’t able to run to take her turn on the swings during recess, so she waited until the bell rang and the other children left for class. She got on the swing and began to swing as high and as fast as she could, she said.
“I felt free as a bird ... until I saw my second grade teacher coming toward me with a paddle in her hand,” she wrote. The teacher marched her back to class, swatting her behind on the way.
“She told me even though I had a problem, I was not allowed to take advantage of the situation,” she said. It would be a lesson she would not fully understand until much later.
Anderson also learned soon enough that she would have to prove that although polio had affected her body, it had not affected her mind. She said a couple of teachers in her schooling made hurtful remarks about her intelligence, the scars of which she would bear until she entered college.
It was there that she was judged on her ability and not on her disabilities, she said.
Another turning point came when she went to work in the psychology department at Harding University in the 1960s. She said it was learning about mental health and how experience shapes one’s life that allowed her to look back on her childhood and come to terms with her experiences.
And 60 years after she first showed symptoms of polio, she stood after a presentation at the Paragould Club to thunderous applause for sharing her story. Leaning on the front table were a pair of wooden crutches, made for a child. They were Anderson’s crutches from the dark days of learning to walk again.
She told the club that she planned on donating the crutches to the Greene County Museum.
She said later that letting go of those old crutches was a relief.
“I’ve wanted to do something with them, but I could never let go of them,” she said. “They represented a big part of my past.”
Anderson recalled in a recent interview that she was an active child in those days, playing cowboys and Indians with her siblings in the woods near their home.
“Mother wouldn’t allow us to stay inside and do nothing,” she said.
But in August 1949, when Anderson was 4 years old, her world would change drastically and without warning.
She remembers getting up one morning.
“I jumped out of bed and took a few steps,” she said. “Unexpectedly, my legs gave way and I fell.”
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“It was devastating back then,” she said of polio. “One of my sisters said it (finding out about Anderson’s diagnosis) was like having a death in the family.”
Polio, also called infantile paralysis, attacks the central nervous system and symptoms manifest themselves with varying degrees of severity, For Anderson, she was paralyzed on her left side and back and was unable to sit up, stand or walk.
Anderson was sent to St. Vincent Hospital in Little Rock for treatment. While there, she underwent a series of treatments that would seem draconian to modern eyes.
She spent six weeks in quarantine at St. Vincent with other children stricken with polio, unable to see her family. The doctors and nurses kept the children at arm’s length and wore masks to protect themselves from contracting the virus, making the patients’ only interactions with them cold and impersonal, she said.
“At that time, medical research was still in the experimental stage relating to treatment for each level of damage the polio virus had inflicted upon each individual,” she wrote in an essay about her experiences. “For me, the years ahead proved to be a grueling succession of trial and error to find procedures, protocol and operations that worked. Some ideas worked; some did not, and some my father just said no to.”
One treatment she described was meant to shock the circulatory system into working normally. It involved being placed in a bathtub-like receptacle. A sheet was placed over her body and ice was poured over her to lower her body temperature. She was later removed from the ice bath and wrapped in hot blankets to raise her body temperature.
“This was an agonizing experience devoid of any compassion for or understanding of all that a four-year-old was feeling,” she wrote.
She recalled her time in the hospital as one marked by loneliness and anxiety.
“I was too young to understand what was going on or why leaving me in the hospital was for my benefit — I only understood I was alone,” she said.
She said there was a pretty girl in the bed beside her who was in an iron lung, a tank respirator that would pull air in and out of the lungs for patients whose chest muscles were paralyzed and unable to breathe on their own.
Anderson said she never learned the girl’s name, but they would talk to each other. Then one day, Anderson woke up and the girl was gone.
“No one would tell me what happened,” she said. “To me, looking back, she probably didn’t make it.”
After the quarantine period passed, she was allowed visits from her family. At the end of one visit, she begged her father and sister to take her home. He told her to watch from a window in the ward and wave to him as they left. Feeling the pain of separation yet again, Anderson became upset and began to beat on the window, screaming. The nurse ordered her to be wrapped tightly like a mummy, Anderson said.
“It was to protect my spine, but I didn’t understand that at the time,” she said.
After six months of treatments and physical therapy, Anderson was able to walk with the aid of crutches and a leg brace. She was finally allowed to go home.
A new set
of challenges
But going home didn’t mark the end of her recovery. She now had to learn to navigate the world with an atrophied left leg and the ever-present leg brace.
Anderson endured several surgeries throughout the rest of her childhood to correct problems in her left leg, which wasn’t growing at the same rate as her right. When the doctors suggested her right leg be shortened, her father refused, she said.
Despite the pain, she was determined to do what others could do physically.
Living with the effects of polio made “me have grit,” she said. “Maybe made me a little on the stubborn side. I didn’t want to be not able to do what everyone else did.”
But there were limits to what she could do. She recalled how she wasn’t able to run to take her turn on the swings during recess, so she waited until the bell rang and the other children left for class. She got on the swing and began to swing as high and as fast as she could, she said.
“I felt free as a bird ... until I saw my second grade teacher coming toward me with a paddle in her hand,” she wrote. The teacher marched her back to class, swatting her behind on the way.
“She told me even though I had a problem, I was not allowed to take advantage of the situation,” she said. It would be a lesson she would not fully understand until much later.
Anderson also learned soon enough that she would have to prove that although polio had affected her body, it had not affected her mind. She said a couple of teachers in her schooling made hurtful remarks about her intelligence, the scars of which she would bear until she entered college.
It was there that she was judged on her ability and not on her disabilities, she said.
Another turning point came when she went to work in the psychology department at Harding University in the 1960s. She said it was learning about mental health and how experience shapes one’s life that allowed her to look back on her childhood and come to terms with her experiences.
And 60 years after she first showed symptoms of polio, she stood after a presentation at the Paragould Club to thunderous applause for sharing her story. Leaning on the front table were a pair of wooden crutches, made for a child. They were Anderson’s crutches from the dark days of learning to walk again.
She told the club that she planned on donating the crutches to the Greene County Museum.
She said later that letting go of those old crutches was a relief.
“I’ve wanted to do something with them, but I could never let go of them,” she said. “They represented a big part of my past.”
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