Photo Album
I find that my relationship with my disability is similar to a marriage. We have an agreement, my disability and I. It requires that I take care of it, and it will allow me to do what I want it will take care of me. It is not an altogether unfriendly relationship. Sometimes it is even a love relationship. Sometimes it is the relationship of a teacher and a student.
Arnold Beisser, 1989
Polios have a certain advantage over the able-bodied when it comes to aging…. We do not confuse the quality of our life with the quality of our tennis game. We know that happiness is not dependent upon activity nor is meaningful defined by trophies. A meaningful life may be hampered—but need not be defined—by pain or disability.
Hugh G. Gallagher, 1998
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While polio is a physical experience, it is also a social one…. Polio does not belong just to those of us who were infected by it, but to our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers, our partners and our children; to those who cared for us, to those who brutalized us (often not mutually exclusive categories); to those who saw us as palimpsests [tablets] on which to write their fear, their pity, their admiration, their empathy, their discomfort.
Anne Finger, 2004
‘What happened to your leg?’ he asks me as he’s loading the groceries into the trunk of my Volvo. ‘I had polio.’ ‘What’s that?’ I feel like an aging movie star who’s been asked her name by a restaurant maitre d’. Polio was as famous as AIDS. Those of us who had it were figures.
Anne Finger, 2004
I don’t think that my disability really changed anything as far as my relationship with my wife and children…. [When] our daughter Louisie was in school (she must’ve been really little), the teacher said to her, ‘Your dad is Bob Gurney. He’s the one who is handicapped.’ Well, Louisie told her, ‘No he’s not. He’s my daddy!’
Robert Gurney, 1996
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Photographs courtesy of Post-Polio Health International, Dan and Carol Wilson, Yoshiko Dart, Lorenzo Milam, Laura Nell Obaugh and Felix Oppenheim-Wedgewood, Joy Weeber and Ron Mace, Laura Kreiss and Ben Minowitz, Marc Shell, John Britt, Jack Warner, Richard J. Castiello, Dick and Barbara Eckhardt, Jean-Marc Giboux, and Rotary International |
