Health

She had gotten it in her 20's before there was a vaccine. Her husband divorced her and left her with a young baby, but she had wealthy parents who took her and her son in. They lived far from us and I only saw her on the few occasions my family drove out to visit, but I had no idea that what she had was polio, and as a kid I never thought to ask my parents. I just figured she had been born like that, only finding out the actual story many years later, after she died. I remember how awful I felt whenever we would visit and I saw the way she suffered. She was completely paralyzed and had to be spoonfed. When I found out the true story, I was shocked to learn she had lived a normal healthy life through adulthood and had been married with a child before getting stricken. It had never even dawned on me that the boy I would see whenever we visited was her son. It's an awful disease.