The Old Swimmer ~ A Polio Success Story
by Susan G Holland — revised version of original 2008 story
My Kind of Exercise
Outside, waiting to be tucked in next to the deck we are slowly constructing, sits a lap pool. still in wraps. The big blue shape will sit there for some weeks still to come. We could set it up just anywhere (the manufacturer assures us that an experienced pool putter-upper can put one together in thirty minutes!), but that is not the dream we have been dreaming. We dream it abutted to our deck, screened with an attractive wood barrier to keep neighbors’ children and neighbors’ eyes out. We dream it as My Element, as pool water has been nearly all my life, starting when I was about three years old.
Look back to about 1939…
The device pictured below is called a Bradford Frame, and it is designed to keep polio victims from moving! This was the prevailing treatment when I got it at about 2 years of age. I swam to escape from this sort of thing.
How Polio was treated in 1938
“Huffy” was a wise physician who had cared for our family who had studied the work of one Sister Kenny in Australia, who was having good success in rehabilitating limbs afflicted by Infantile Paralysis by using gradual movement therapy, starting with gentle massage, and working up to exercises that build up muscle. “Huffy” lobbied my parents and my other doctors to allow her to try these techniques on my legs, after months that made it clear that the Bradford Frame would not improve my condition.
After I got back up on my feet ( and I did! ) my exercise progressed to tricycle riding to relearning how to walk, to roller skates, and then to swimming.
My swimming progressed from being a little fish to being a competitive swimmer. By the age of seven i was winning in swimming events with girls much older than I was. It was the legs, not the upper body that gave me my edge in competitive swimming. I had, and still have, enormously powerful leg muscles, and good flappy feet on the ends of those legs, and right through my competitive swimming career I could beat anyone in “kicks” , including the big boys, propelling a kick-board through the water during swimming practice.
My strongest stroke was backstroke and I have a big box of blue ribbons and gold medals from my youth through my senior year of high school to remind me of this. Oh and plenty of red, green and yellow ribbons and silver and bronze medals to be sure. (now gifted to my grand-kids who think I’m famous — heh heh.)
Backstroke
I retired at 18 from competitive swimming because I wanted to do so many other things, including my art, my college classes, socializing some, and just having a sort of balanced life rather than living to the tune of swimming practice sessions all the time.
But to be submerged in up to the earlobes — yes, that is me in My Element!
Thanks to Huffy! (the late Mary I Hough, D.O.)
Epilogue 2017: The lap pool was bought but never installed — life happens.
Originally published by Susan G Holland at oldswimmer.wordpress.com on August 1, 2008.
