Finding perseverance in illness

A personal reflection on how my father coped with and conquered polio in a digital story -- a sequence of photographs and an audio narration.

My father was one of the few adults who was stricken with polio just months before the vaccine was developed. At first they thought he had spinal meningitis. He spent nine months at what was then Children’s Hospital in Boston and came home to intensive physical therapy and resumption of his work as a doctor in a rural setting.

My mom drove him to his first house calls and was the primary person helping him with his therapy. Eventually, with a metal brace on his left leg, a corset with metal stays to offset his lack of back muscle, he learned to drive adapted cars, made house calls on his own and scooted around the hospital where he worked in a kid’s wheelchair.

My Dad bristled at the term “handicapped,” once saying that polio made him a better doctor; it slowed him down, made him listen more. Patients in our small town agreed, saying that when they saw my Dad muscling up their front stairs on crutches in the midst of a snowstorm, they didn’t feel half as bad.

The image I use as the lede in this story was one I found in an old box of personal stuff of my Mom’s. There was one of her as well. Both were taken in 1946 on their honeymoon in Havana, Cuba. What was startling about the picture of my Dad was the beauty of the moment, of the dive, of his legs. I have no memory of my father with full use of his legs.

I created this digital story with StoryCenter, a non-profit in California that helped develop the practice of creating a personal digital story — a story with text (often a narration), audio and images (sometimes with video clips).

Story Center focuses its work on helping you explore your own personal experiences on the belief that in the creating and telling of these stories, you find hidden meaning.

I did this story as well as one on my mother’s death — A Story of Forgiveness — in part for three courses I taught with Joe Lambert, the founder of Story Center, and the late Maria Martin, creator of Latino USA on National Public Radio. I used them as examples for our students to consider, to learn from. Joe also had me show them A Giving Thanks Story, which technically was just a Photo Story as there is only one image with the audio.

As someone who has been involved with words and newspapers most of my life, the digital story is a freeing genre, it allows you to use captured sound and/or the intimacy your own voice as well as a sequence of images to deepen the story you are telling. They are perfect stories for the Web.

They also are relatively easy to do. In late spring, I will be giving workshops and you can do some yourselves. All you have to do is subscribe: