Living with Polio

Jamie Cone

May 2, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Helju Batchelder makes rolls for a family dinner at her home in Brattleboro, Friday afternoon. (Zachary P. Stephens/Reformer)

BRATTLEBORO -- Helju Batchelder has lived a life filled with family, adventure and love, and whether its her Estonian heritage or a fierce determination of her own, nothing has kept her from getting what she wanted out of life.

Until she stands up, revealing that she walks with a cane, you wouldn't know she suffered from polio as a teenager, especially not after listening to the stories she has to tell of raising two children and embarking on overseas adventures.

Batchelder was stricken with the disease in Germany in the 1940's. She and her parents and younger brother were living in Germany at the time, having fled their native country of Estonia when Batchelder was in her teens.

She had just completed a camping trip with the Girl Scouts in the Bavarian Mountains when she came down with a fever that would change her life. None of the German doctors knew what she had until an American recognized the symptoms as polio.

Batchelder pulled through the illness, which oddly enough was not caught by anyone else, neither family members nor the 40 young Girl Scouts with whom she had just shared a tent.

She spent a year in the hospital and, with the use of a cane, learned how to get along with the limited function of her leg muscles. One year after she contracted the disease, she and her family came to Vermont.

Despite having limited English-speaking skills when she arrived as a high school junior, she completed college

at Middlebury, studying political science with a minor in economics, as well as one year of graduate school at Harvard in the women's business administration program.

"My parents always had said that their children would go to college," she said.

Batchelder met her husband, Don, and together they had two children of their own. Her troublesome "drop toe," a common symptom of polio that causes sufferers to stumble and stub their toes, was repaired with an ankle fusion operation just in time

Martie Fox and Janet Purdie sit at the Holton Home in Brattleboro, Friday. (Zachary P. Stephens/Reformer)

for the arrival of her first baby.

"I had the cast taken off in the morning, and that night, probably around 2 a.m., I had my first child," she said.

"All the nurses were oohing and ahhing about you getting your cast off and scrubbing your skin, but they didn't have much time for that," Don Batchelder remembered with a laugh.

It took years of wearing cumbersome leg braces before the ankle fusion solved the problem and left Batchelder relatively unhindered, still walking with a cane, until she had to receive artificial knees later in life.

Now, she is facing an entirely new battle with the disease.

"We used to be members of the swimming club, but now all day I have to wear two braces, and they're hard to get on and off," she said.

Batchelder is living with post-polio syndrome, a recurrence of the disease that appears in about 40 percent of patients, usually around 30 years after the initial infection.

Symptoms include loss of muscle strength and pain in areas where previously there had been none.

"I can do things for a while, but I don't have much strength," Batchelder said. "I always managed. Now I keep a walker that folds up, and outside I use crutches."

"In polio, it's a fight to stand up," she added. "And in post-polio, you go back ... and heaven forbid, there's the walker."

One theory about post-polio syndrome, Batchelder said, is that certain muscles are used so much in order to compensate for the weakness of others that years later they just can't handle the strain any longer.

"Most people with polio tend to be overachievers," Batchelder said, "pushing straight through, saying, 'If I can't do it this way, I'll do it that way.' We use our muscles to the fullest."

"It is frustrating -- just when you think you've got the polio pretty under control, and you feel settled, there's the post-polio," said Martie Fox, a post-polio syndrome patient who lives at the Holton Home in Brattleboro.

Fox grew up in Readsboro and Jacksonville, where many people came down with polio in the 1950s. She and her cousin both caught it -- one day apart from each other -- when Fox was 17-years-old.

She spent one week in an iron lung, a piece of equipment designed to keep polio patients from dying when their lungs became paralyzed.

Only the patient's head is exposed, and he or she can only talk while the machine is "breathing" out.

"It was terrifying," Fox said.

Despite the setback, Fox eventually recovered her ability to walk, with some paralysis also occurring in her arms and hands. She spent most of her working years as a secretary within her local school district.

Many years later, she realized she was suffering from post-polio syndrome when watching the late-night news.

"They had a story taking about how post-polio syndrome has arrived," she said. "I had been fatigued a lot more than usual and thought, 'Boy, am I getting lazy,' but I saw (the news story) and said, 'Hey! It's not my fault!'"

Janet Purdie, who also resides at the Holton Home, had almost no trouble walking at all until she began to see the symptoms of post-polio take hold of her ability to use her legs about 6 1/2 years ago.

Like Fox, Purdie caught the disease in her hometown -- in her case, Rochester, N.Y. -- in the midst of an epidemic. She was 4-years-old and doesn't remember much of the ordeal.

"I remember lying on the couch, and my arm hurt terribly," Purdie said. "The doctor told my mother that I didn't have leave home -- that I was out of danger."

She has had weakness in one arm her whole life but still raised two children, whose hair she kept short when they were young so that it would be easier to manage with one hand.

She said post-polio syndrome is often mistaken for other things; the slow, degenerative loss of muscle function is much like ALS, the major difference being that ALS ultimately causes breathing problems.

Purdie now uses a wheel chair to get around all of the time.

She said she hopes that the disease can be irradiated throughout the world.

"It's been wonderful (to see the disease controlled), but sometimes countries don't keep up; if no one has it for a while, their leaders give up giving it to them," she said.

And she's right -- despite vaccine being available for decades, in a few remaining parts of the world there is still a massive, ongoing effort to wipe out the disease.

According to Unicef's official Web Site, on April 22, emergency measures have were launched by the government of southern Sudan to stop a polio outbreak spreading across the Horn of Africa.

In India, with its high population density and large number of births, polio continues challenge even the most efficient immunization programs.

Those who would like to support immunization efforts world-wide can help raise money this Saturday by buying a ticket to see two Indian films, followed by an Indian meal, at the Latchis and the Brattleboro Museum Art and Art Center. The event begins at the Latchis Theatre at 3:30 p.m., then moves to the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center at 6:30 p.m. for the meal.

Tickets can be purchased at the Latchis Hotel, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center and Vermont Artisans Designs and Gallery for $25. Tickets for the films only are $10.

More information about the Indian Film and Food Festival" can be found at www.brattlebororotaryclub.org.

Jaime Cone can be reached at jcone@reformer.com or 802-254-2311, ext. 277.

Newstex ID: 34609528