Standing—With Confidence

October 1999

Elinor, Age 5

“She was the first polio patient of 1952 at St. Luke’s hospital in Spokane,” Mr. Carper said. I hadn’t known that. I knew that I was hospitalized in January, but didn’t know I had that special distinction until Mr. Carper mentioned it when he came to speak to our Polio Outreach of Spokane meeting. He was the physical therapist at St. Luke’s hospital in 1952. I was just five years old, but I have clear memories of snow falling as my dad tried to walk quickly yet carefully as he carried me up the sidewalk to the hospital’s emergency entrance.

“Hurry, Daddy. I can’t breathe.”

The next thing I remember was waking up in the white world of isolation curtains. A pull-string to call a nurse was pinned to the bed near my head, but my arms wouldn’t move to reach and pull it. I couldn’t move anything but my eyes, as they took in the strangeness of it all.

Mr. Carper also told another story I hadn’t remembered:

“Elinor was crawling on the exercise mat,” he said, “and I told her, ‘You look like a snake, crawling like that.’
‘I do not!’ she countered.
‘Yes you do.’
‘No I don’t! Snakes don’t crawl with arms and legs.’
‘How do they crawl, then?’
After some contemplation, Elinor replied, ‘They crawl with their all-together. Except their eyes.’”

Hearing that story made me smile because it and my own memories of those hospital days, as I reflect upon them, show me a little girl who had a confident self-identity. An identity that stayed intact while growing up visibly different from children who could run, jump, ride a bike, walk without a “galumph,” bat a baseball and carry their own books to school.

As I rub shoulders with other polio survivors in our support group or on the Internet, I see that not all of us came through this devastating disease with such confidence — and no wonder. Some of us were teased unmercifully at school or shunned by people who didn’t know how to react to someone who is nonstandard.

So what gave me the confidence of a positive personhood? By what power could I refuse to internalize society’s insults, rebuffs and mis-descriptions of me? I believe the answer to that has it’s groundings in those same early months in the hospital after getting polio.

My daddy, like the father of any five-year old girl from a happy home, was my protector and the one who made bad things all better again. Then polio stuck and daddy couldn’t be there in the hospital to help and protect. He couldn’t be there when I was all alone and frightened, feeling life slip away. He couldn’t help when my lungs finally lost the strength to pump air any more.

My daddy wasn’t there, but he had taught me that God was always with me, would never leave me, and could help when no one else could. So, almost like an automatic reflex, that night when I was so frightened that my life was ending, with child-like simplicity I asked God to please help. He did. Immediately I felt peace and knew he was there, making sure I was O.K. At that moment I knew that I mattered to God; I was important to him. He had a plan for me, he loved me and he would see me through, no matter what. He became my other, unlimited “Daddy.”

I suppose that can be seen as pretty incredible insight for a five-year old. When you look at it, though, it’s actually quite simple. And there in the hospital, as “the Sunday School lady” came every week to each room with her flannel graph board and told Bible stories about Jesus, my trust in his love and my knowledge of his smile on me became firmly anchored in his own words.

So, by the time I left the hospital, I was standing confidently, not only on the outside but on the inside as well. My identity was firmly rooted in God’s statement of his love for me, and nothing has or ever can shake that.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
‘For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35-39)