My Childhood Polio is Catching Up with Me in the Winter of My Life

Me and My younger brother Erico( RIP), Jaro, Iloilo, Philippines, 1937

Just recently, I started feeling a continuous tingling pain on my knee and other muscles on my left leg. The pain is tolerable most of the time that I do not have to take aspirin or another analgesic. Lately, however when the cold temperature gets below freezing or near freezing the pain has bothered me more. So is this arthritis? I do attribute this to part of the aging process, that is the stage I will call the winter of my life.

Because of this I remember my childhood years. I was told by my parents I had polio when I was two years old. I was paralyzed for a year but recovered when I was three and a half years old. The polio resulted so that my right leg is shorter than my left leg, but not short enough to show A LIMP, BUT STILL affected my physical ability to run as a child. As a child I was frail and not athletic at all. I grew up feeling physically inferior and frail that resulted to some bullying in my teenage years. I compensated my being not athletic by developing my mind by reading a lot. My parents told me I was a precocious child that I was reading at the age of three, books and magazine for adults. I did indeed excelled in math and science and graduated top of my class( Valedictorian) in high school.

Here's a paragraph from Wikipedia about polio explaining the title of my post above. Note at the bold and last sentence in the paragraph.

Poliomyelitis, often called polio or infantile paralysis, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. In about 0.5% of cases there is muscle weakness resulting in an inability to move. This can occur over a few hours to few days. The weakness most often involves the legs but may less commonly involve the muscles of the head, neck and diaphragm. Many but not all people fully recover. In those with muscle weakness about 2% to 5% of children and 15% to 30% of adults die. Another 25% of people have minor symptoms such as fever and a sore throat and up to 5% have headache, neck stiffness and pains in the arms and legs. These people are usually back to normal within one or two weeks. In up to 70% of infections there are no symptoms. Years after recovery post-polio syndrome may occur, with a slow development of muscle weakness similar to that which the person had during the initial infection

Here's a short video and poem about the Winter of Our Lives-Macrine and I are in the Winter of Our Lives. The sea scenes remind me of the Amoingon Coast, Boac, Marinduque, Philippines where our beach house and retirement home-Chateau Du Mer is located. Typhoon Nina hit and slammed directly Marindique on Christmas Day. Damage of the typhoon had been published in my blogs the last couple of days.



Here's also is Chapter 1 of My Autobiography in case you have not read it: http://davidbkatague.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-1-childhood-memories-of.html