The polio vaccine, which turned 50 this past month, came just a little too late for Yvonne Failner, who contracted polio when she was 10. But it was in time to protect her children.
Thursday, Failner, her husband, Vaughn, and former Utah first lady Norma Matheson talked about the impact of the vaccine, introduced April 12, 1955, in the midst of what had become a polio epidemic in America. Because of it, polio has been pretty much eradicated in America, although it continues to ravage some of the world's poorest countries.
As the three visited, young children and senior citizens were being provided a number of immunizations, many of them free, at Northwest Multi-Purpose Center, courtesy of the Greater Salt Lake Immunization Coalition and its partners. An old iron lung, provided by local Rotarians, stood against the wall. The Rotary has made providing polio vaccines to underdeveloped nations a priority.
Yvonne Failner was playing outside when sudden exhaustion got to her that summer day in 1949. She went inside and lay down, something so unexpected that her bed was the last place her mother thought to look when it was time to call her for dinner.
She had a fever and her mom summoned a doctor, who, within minutes, had sent for an ambulance. She doesn't remember the next two weeks, which she spent in the old county hospital. Fortunately, she said, no one in her family or immediate neighborhood got polio.
The treatment she remembers was a mishmash of hot blankets and massages, then moving her legs around.
After that, she was transferred to St. Mark's Hospital.
When she got home, Failner had to wear shoes with lifts and always had some trouble with activities like gym. But most of the symptoms eventually diminished.
Twelve years ago, polio delivered another blow. She'd had trouble walking, was exhausted and achy. Doctors thought at first she had arthritis. It was, in fact, a condition called post-polio, which is becoming very familiar to many people who contracted polio when they were younger. It affects nearly three-fourths of the polio survivors to varying degrees at some point.
These days, she can walk around her house, but to travel more than room to room, she must use a scooter.
It was serious enough, Vaughn noted, that they had to move to a house that would be more accessible.
As for Matheson, a longtime proponent of immunizations, she remembers a sense of relief when the vaccine came along in time for her children to be protected from the disease.
E-mail: lois@desnews.com