Chapter 1-Birth to Polio
I saw an orange light in front of me and above me. Then a bright white light and pain as someone slapped my tear end.
About 18 months later I was on Moms lap and we were riding a train, fromChicago, Illinois to San Fernando, California.
Just short glimpses of memory where me and my two brothers are baby talkin to each other, but not yet understanding the parents language. I tell my brothers that as soon as I figure out what the parents are saying I would tell them.
So when I learn enough Lamaze to understand the parents, then the understanding of the baby all goes away.
About December 1949 my right knee hurts. The dr comes by and they think I have polio, so I am taken by ambulance to the Los Angeles General Hospital and put into the polio ward which has enough beds fir 40 kids.
I see two kids transported inside a iron lung. While there one dr and two nurses et polio. By now they have learned that when the child is running a fever, then they are contagious.
Do hospital policy is changed so that if anyone has a fever they are not transported until the fever breaks.
I spend 10 days in the ward then am transferred to the juvenile arthritis ward, after they do surgery on me and sew my vagina shut to make me only be a boy.
A few month later I’m pulling a sled with my younger brothers on it, because it is snowing in Pacoima, California.
