Fairfield resident recounts husband’s battle with polio

In certain parts of the world and in states such as New York and New Jersey, hospitals are being overwhelmed by patients with COVID-19.

Dorothy Rathbun, a resident at SunnyBrook Assisted Living in Fairfield, remembers in the 1950s when hospitals were filled with patients battling a different disease, polio.

One of them was her husband, William, who survived the illness but suffered from its effects the rest of his life.

Dorothy and William, or 'Bill” was he was known, were both raised in Wichita, Kansas. In fact, they were neighbors. The two married in 1949, and just over a year later in August of 1950, Bill fell terribly ill. Dorothy remembers the episode like it was yesterday, recalling what happened each day of the week.

'On Monday, he wasn't feeling good, but it didn't slow him down,” she remembers. 'But on Tuesday, he was sick to his stomach.”

The couple went to St. Francis Hospital in Wichita to see a doctor, who gave Bill medicine to settle his stomach. It didn't work. On Wednesday of that week, Bill's mother visited the couple and told Dorothy, 'You've got a very sick husband.” They returned to the doctor, and this time Bill was admitted to the hospital.

Diagnosis

That same night, Bill was placed in a room with several other patients, but the doctors soon moved Bill to a room by himself. The following day, the medical staff told Dorothy they were moving her husband again, to the children's floor. They believed he had contracted polio.

'Back then, hospitals were full of children with polio. At least one floor of every hospital was full of polio patients,” Dorothy said. In fact, Bill at 24 years of age was the oldest polio patient at the hospital. At first, his case was so bad that it looked like he wouldn't make it.

'On Thursday night, the doctor told me Bill had three days to live,” Dorothy said. 'It was a blow in several ways. I was packing for him to go back to college for the fall term at Southwest Baptist College in Bolivar, Missouri.”

Polio is a virus that can destroy nerve cells in the spinal cord, causing paralysis. Some patients needed to be inside an 'iron lung” that breathed for them because the virus had paralyzed their chest muscles. Dorothy said the doctors had an iron lung waiting for Bill, but fortunately the polio did not paralyze his chest, and he never needed one. Dorothy said it was heartbreaking to see a little child in one of those iron lungs.

'Sometimes the kids had to be taken out of it for five minutes, and they would scream because they wanted back in. They couldn't breathe,” Dorothy said.

Unable to eat

Bill had a lot of what Dorothy called 'crud” that built up in his lungs, but he was able to remove it himself with a handheld suction device. Without it, he would have choked to death. Bill's throat was paralyzed to the point he was no longer able to eat, and could speak only softly. He had to be fed intravenously, which back then meant resting his arm on a wooden board for two hours without being able to move it.

'He was in a lot of pain when he had to move that arm again,” Dorothy recalled. 'But my husband was not a complainer. If he could find a joke in a situation, he would. He was more concerned about the little children he saw.”

Polio mostly affected children. Dorothy said one of the rare joys from this era came when she visited a swimming pool in the hospital. The pool was filled with very warm water, which helped children move limbs they couldn't otherwise.

'It was wonderful to watch those kids kick and play,” she said.

Slow recovery

Dorothy and Bill's mother got to visit him in the hospital, once for an hour in the morning and then again for another hour in the afternoon. Bill spent two weeks in isolation, and later moved to a room that he shared with a 19-year-old man named Harry, the only other polio patient over 18 years of age.

In some ways, Harry had it worse than Bill because Harry was mostly paralyzed save for the ability to bring a glass of water from his tray to his lips. When Bill's mother brought him a barbecued beef sandwich, Bill could do nothing more than smell it. Unable to eat it, he gave the sandwich to Harry.

After weeks in the hospital, Bill was able to return to solid foods. Dorothy recalls the first thing he ate was a spoonful of thin tomatoes.

'Everybody was thrilled to death,” she said. 'They went down to the kitchen to get more tomatoes, but they were out.”

That paralysis in Bill's throat went away eventually but left its mark. Dorothy said, from that point forward, choking was a major concern for Bill.

'It affected the food he ate later in life,” she said. 'If he started to choke, he'd signal, and we knew what he needed. Some foods were impossible to eat, like popcorn. He needed something that went down easily.”

Release

Bill was dismissed from the hospital after five weeks. It was a long road to recovery. He waited until the second semester of that school year to return to the classroom, and even then Bill took night classes because he couldn't handle an entire day. Professors helped him regain his speaking voice, and before long he was chewing gum and blowing bubbles.

'One of the star actors in the drama club helped him with his voice, otherwise, Bill would never have been able to preach,” Dorothy said, referring to Bill's 50-year career in the ministry. Sadly, though Bill regained his speaking voice, he was never able to recoup his baritone singing voice.

Five years after Bill contracted the virus, American physician Jonas Salk developed the world's first polio vaccine in 1955. The vaccine was mass produced and distributed around the world. When Bill and Dorothy took their children to get the vaccine, the doctor informed Bill that he would need one, too. There are six polio viruses, and Bill had only been exposed to two of them.

Comparison to today

Dorothy said the current pandemic of the coronavirus is similar in some ways to the scourge of polio decades ago, but in other ways it's very different. For one, modern medicine has advanced by leaps and bounds in that time, and much more is known about how diseases are spread.

Whereas today people are told to keep apart and cover their faces to avoid transmitting the coronavirus, there was nothing like that for the polio virus. Though scientists now know that polio is transmitted through food or by touch with an infected person, Dorothy said the public was unaware of this years ago.

'Nobody knew how polio was contracted,” she said. 'We didn't let children play outside because we were afraid it was in the grass. We saw child after child come down with it.”

Dorothy said she was not worried about contracting polio from her husband. She asked a doctor what she could do to protect herself, and the doctor told her simply to eat well and rest.

Bill lived to be 92 before dying of pneumonia, a disease he had off and on during the last few years of his life. He and Dorothy moved to Iowa in 1966, and raised three children. Dorothy and their son, John, have remained in Fairfield. John works in financial management through Graf & Company. Bill and Dorothy also have two daughters, Becky Krause who lives in Winnebago, Minnesota, and Candi Tibbals, who resides in Dubuque.

John said polio was just one of the many challenges his dad faced during his life, which included poverty, four fathers (or step fathers) and a unique dedication to working tirelessly to help struggling small churches.

'Yet, he had an innate ability to take it all in stride and make it blossom,” John said. 'He never saw a half-empty glass. He'd envision a sour fruit making a great lemonade. He believed everyone deserved to find a better life, especially one grounded in God's faith.”

John echoed his mother's sentiments about the lasting effect polio had on his father at meal time. Choking was a 'very common occurrence,” John said, and the whole family paused in concern, wondering if they'd seen their father take his last breath. Even then, their father would finish that meal with gratefulness.

On how his father would have reacted to COVID-19, John remarked: 'People are recognizing all of the blessings we foolishly take for granted and he'd have found a thousand ways to reach out and touch someone – from a distance. Viruses are just a moment in time, not the definition of a life well lived.”