Comments by "christine paris" (@christineparis5607) on "Polio: The Disease that Paralyzed the World" video.
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@lunartears6761
I was a kid in the 60s, and there was a chicken pox epidemic that swept through our neighborhood in practically 24 hours, we ALL got it, about 27 kids. I luckily only had a couple of pox scabs, but my best friend was quite literally covered from head to toe, she even had 2 on her tongue!! Her mother was terrified she would be completely scarred for life because they itched her to death. It was the big days of doctors tranquilizing housewives to complete imbecility, so her mom gave her some dope to keep her from scratching...the only great thing was that, since we ALL had it, we got to play together, and no one was confined to the house, except for 2 kids who were very ill. You can die even from chicken pox. Every single one of them got shingles later too. I didn't, but I developed an auto immune disorder by 35, which was like waking up sick one morning, and never getting better. Vaccines are worth the risk!!
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My mother was born in 1925, at "home", which was a shack for cowboys on a ranch outside of Dallas. She was delivered by an indian midwife, since she was the result of a romance between my grandma and a young man on the reservation. There were no medical checkups, vaccines or other preventive services, and, perhaps because of her native American genes, she never seemed to suffer from a lot of childhood illnesses, but she told me many times that many of her little friends growing up died of mumps, polio, went deaf or blind from measles or scarlet fever, etc. Some kids would get sick and stay in bed for years. They would never really get well. Since they were very poor, they just survived, and that's about it. She married my dad at a very young age but because of her starved constitution, couldn't have a successful pregnancy until her 30s. When I arrived, I went to the doctor every five minutes! Every vaccine, every new treatment, antibiotics for a hangnail, she wanted me to have it. She became a rabid advocate for every medical treatment that came along! She overdid it, and we teased her relentlessly, but I found out later from grandma how many little friends of hers died when she was growing up, and I understood.
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