His three months in the hospital included an iron lung, a rocking bed and painful physical therapy. He learned how to stay positive in the face of adversity.

Thomas Fetterman caught polio when he was 8. His various hospital stays included needing an iron lung. Despite his many challenges he always looks for the positive aspects of his experiences.

My parents decided to volunteer our entire family (themselves included), feeling strongly that it was the right thing to do.

His parents would have given anything for their son to have had a vaccine to prevent polio.

These Philadelphia-area polio survivors continue to suffer from a disease thought to be long gone.

According to John T. Margie, US Marine Corp, Retired “It’s the training that makes the difference”.

She remembers the day she felt too tired to feed those chickens, and was too tired to hold her 9-month-old niece. Finally, the family doctor was called and her parents were told she had the “the flu or grippe”

One day I was an active 12-year-old riding my bike, playing baseball with my friends and climbing trees on my grandmother’s farm. The next day, I remember feeling bad, missing school and developing a limp.

I probably didn’t give much thought to my plain brown shoes in the beginning. I was just happy to be on my feet and walking.

I had just returned from a week’s vacation at Geneva on the Lake. I was almost eighteen years old and was embarking on a nursing career. While at home, I was preparing to start an “on the floor” study the on the following Monday. Three days prior, I started having a weird sensation on my skin.

One morning, shortly before my ninth birthday, I had trouble getting my shoes on, but eventually I did and went off to school with this thought from my mother - “If you have any trouble during school, go to the office”.

Donahue is not the ‘woe is me’ type. If people ask him about his uneven gait, he usually just tells them he’d tripped over something the other day.

I wish my parents were alive right now so that I could hear all about the decisions they had to make, the fears they experienced and the trust they had in medical professionals when I was diagnosed at age two, with Poliomyelitis in 1950.

Rome, 1950. I was twenty-two and had been traveling through Europe for six weeks with Carol, my college roommate. We had another month remaining before returning to the United States.

One August day I was outside in front of our home playing hopscotch with some of the other girls in the neighborhood, when I realized I did not feel well. A few days later, my right arm was paralyzed and I was put into quarantine.

Recently I had the opportunity to return to the hospital where I received twenty-two months of rehabilitation following polio in 1952. At that time it was known as the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children.