Peter was born in
1945. He has one older sister and one younger. He remembers his miserable
experience with both chicken pox and measles. He was lucky, he knows, not to
have any complications from either disease, but young as he was, he remembers
his experience with both as quite unpleasant.
Peter was not yet six when he had the chicken pox. His older sister got it, and he got it a few
days after. His parents feared that the youngest, his two-year-old sister,
would also get it. Luckily, she did not. Peter says: “I think we were both had
the running sores at the same time. That was pretty miserable.”
Peter remembers being
“slathered with calamine lotion several times a day and having these big
pink splotches everywhere. Although it was standard treatment at the time, it
didn’t seem to help much.” He doesn’t remember how long he was sick for, but
“the temptation to scratch was so intense that for a few days I know I was
wearing my kiddie-size boxing gloves that I had gotten for Christmas the year
before.” It was his parents’ idea, and
“they definitely kept me from scratching.”
His measles experience, at around ten years of age, was also
memorable, though he seemed to have had a mild case, since he does not remember
feeling particularly ill. He does vividly remember having to stay in a darkened
room and not being allowed to do anything at all. Any mental stimulation or
excitement was thought to be bad for a child with measles at that time. It was
summer, and he missed the Fourth of July fireworks, and playing with sparklers,
and was upset that he could hear his sisters enjoying themselves outside. An
avid reader, he was not allowed to read, and felt that deprivation keenly.
Two summers in a row, a little past his tenth birthday,
there were polio epidemics. They were not allowed to go to crowded public
places, including beaches, amusement parks, municipal swimming pools, even to
the movies. “It was basically stay-close-to-home time. We were worried to
death. At one point we were in a doctor’s waiting room and a kid came through
who had been exposed to someone who had active polio, and I had a few days of
worrying about that, though I now realize the risk was very small. That’s how
strong and pervasive the fear was before the Salk vaccine.”
He remembers seeing and reading about iron lungs, the iconic
symbol of polio. They were tubular metal tanks in which one lay, with only
one’s head sticking out. A tight seal around the neck isolated the tank from
room air pressure, and a piston decreased the air pressure inside, drawing air
into the paralyzed person’s lungs.
Later, as an adult, he got a close-up experience: “…I started
working for a med school, and … we had a few old iron lungs tucked in the back
of one hallway. Before they were
disposed of we actually got a chance to see what it was like to be in one. It
was quite strange having the air go in and out with no effort on your part.
They even had a cough setting which would actually force you to cough by a rapid motion of the piston.”
Asked how it felt, he said: “I’ve never been particularly claustrophobic
(until the first time I had an MRI of my head) so I didn’t have that feeling,
but the seal around the neck was not terribly pleasant—then again, if you were
in one of those things you probably wouldn’t be able to scratch it anyway. But
the knowledge that this machine is breathing for you, even when you could
breathe on your own, that was a little strange. I don’t know if I can get my
head around what it would be like to have
to breathe with that machine.”
In 2008, he mentions, the last person dependent on an ironlung in the United States died – not of her disease per se, but from a power
failure.
There were almost always children in every school Peter attended
that had legs in calipers (Americans call them braces). He vividly remembers a boy
who sat next to him in a class whose right arm was nothing but skin and bone
from polio. “I had a strange fascination with it; I’m sure he thought I was
extremely rude.”
A memory from a later age also remains with him: “When I was
in college, I went to a mixer, … and I saw this stunningly beautiful girl sitting
at a table. I went over and made a little chit-chat, asked her if she wanted to
dance and she said “No, I can’t.” I stupidly asked why, and she just kind of turned
away and waved me off, making a “go away” gesture with her hand. Later in the evening I saw her leaving the
area where we had the mixer and she was walking with a pronounced limp. One of
her legs was just skin and bone. ”
While Peter did not have other vaccine preventable diseases, they were in the
background – whooping cough, mumps. He remembers mumps “was going around when I
was in my teens and my mother I recall being concerned that I would get it
because I’m the last male in my particular patriarchal line and I had ‘a
responsibility to carry on the family name.’ ”
In high school, there was a classmate who died of meningitis.
“It was early in the week, Monday or Tuesday, and in Latin class Miss Gardner
started talking about a girl who was absent, whom I didn't know very well, and
the way she was talking—"it was meningitis, and it was very
quick"—and I was thinking "Wait, what? Someone died?" Yes,
someone in our Latin class died of meningitis over a weekend. I'm told that
because of the vaccine, most doctors these days have never seen a case of it.”
Peter also remembers having the flu as an adult. He says:
“it’s not a bad cold. It feels like you’ve been hit by a truck. If the air is
circulating in the room and your hair
moves it hurts. Just incredible hypersensitivity to any sort of touch to the
skin. Any effort at all would cause me to start sweating, and I could feel the
droplets flowing across my scalp. They
hurt."
More recently, in 2009, Peter lost a Facebook friend to H1N1
flu. He describes her as a “very colorful woman; absolutely unforgettable.” To
protect her privacy, he asked not to disclose her name, but he said: “When she
was first taken sick, she kept going on — posting on Facebook — about how bad
she felt. Really, really bad. She was hospitalized and it was reported that
they were still trying to figure out what she had, and a few days later some family
was there and all of a sudden she sat bolt upright, stopped breathing, fell
back and she was gone; they couldn’t being her back. And it turns out that it
was H1N1 flu, verified by PCR testing.”
Peter says: “When the H1N1 flu vaccine first came out, one
of my Facebook friends asked our circle if we thought she should get the
vaccine. Despite the fact that that particular group leans strongly toward
“alternative medicine,” the discussion was fairly polite. Some of the usual
misinformation was shared, like “I got the flu from the vaccine; never again,” and she said that she'd decided to take her
chances because the "natural" immunity was "better,” and I thought,
“To get the natural immunity you have to get sick as hell for two weeks; what
is wrong with you.” I don’t remember
whether I posted that or not; sometimes it’s best to just accept that people
won’t make the best choice despite your efforts.”
“Pro-vaccination?” Peter concludes. “I'm as pro-vaccination as it gets.” Knowing what he knows,
seeing what he has seen, he does not understand how anyone could be otherwise.
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