Scroll down for my Boston Glone lettter:
For those outides the firewall. This is what I said. They edited out the material in brackets.
Some 70 years ago when I was ten or eleven years old, I
suffered from sinusitis. It was severe enough that I was in hospital for a few
weeks in the winter at the Bristol (UK) Children’s Hospital. All I remember
about the treatment was that at night, they bundled us up warmly and trundled
our hospital beds on to an open balcony so we could get fresh air while we
slept. [I do remember that the patients were cared for by rotating shifts of
nurses from the West Indies; part of the Windrush diaspora that saved the
expanding British National Health Service in its early years.]
During the day we were free to sit in bed, walk around our
ward, and venture a little into nearby wards as long as they were not filled
with infectious children.
Our ward was adjacent to the polio ward. Several kids were
usually swinging around on their crutches making good time going from friend to
friend. They were the lucky ones. Others, sicker, were propped up in their beds
reading or listening to headphones. The sickest were cocooned in their iron
lungs that wheezed while squeezing air into these critically ill kids to help
them stay alive.
I always remember that the kids on crutches were awed that I
could walk around without any help.
Within ten years, polio vaccinations eliminated this
devastating disease from our lives.
Right now the COVID-19 vaccines
are keeping this disease from further ravaging our society. They will only do
so if all of us who can get vaccinated do get vaccinated. Any adverse reactions
to the vaccine are miniscule compared with the suffering that one might
experience if COVID-19 struck.
I will never forget how as a
child, I saw polio stricken youngsters my age facing a life on crutches or in
iron lungs, just like COVID-19 sufferers on ventilators are immobilized. That
haunting memory made me set aside vaccination hesitation.
