Walk A Mile In My Braces

Walk A Mile In My Braces is a journey through the experience of challenge as taught by the young. 75 youth who all experience Charcot Marie Tooth Disease (CMT) share their joys, their struggles, and the wisdom they have learned by walking through life with challenge. Prepare to be inspired by all that these young authors share with regards to their scars, lessons learned, and gifts received by rising to their challenge.

Polio was the most dreaded childhood disease of twentieth-century America. Every summer during the 1940s and 1950s, parents were terrorized by the thought that polio might cripple their children. They warned their children not to drink from public fountains, to avoid swimming pools, and to stay away from movie theaters and other crowded places. Whenever and wherever polio struck, hospitals filled with victims of the virus. Many experienced only temporary paralysis, but others faced a lifetime of disability. Living with Polio is the first book to focus primarily on the personal stories of the men and women who had acute polio and lived with its crippling consequences. Writing from personal experience, polio survivor Daniel J. Wilson shapes this impassioned book with the testimonials of more than one hundred polio victims, focusing on the years between 1930 and 1960. He traces the entire life experience of the survivors—from the alarming diagnosis all the way to the recent development of post-polio syndrome, a condition in which the symptoms of the disease may return two or three decades after they originally surfaced. Living with Polio follows every physical and emotional stage of the disease: the loneliness of long separations from family and friends suffered by hospitalized victims; the rehabilitation facilitieswhere survivors spent a full year or more painfully trying to regain the use of their paralyzed muscles; and then the return home, where they were faced with readjusting to school or work with the aid of braces, crutches, or wheelchairs while their families faced the difficult responsibilities of caring for and supporting a child or spouse with a disability. Poignant and gripping, Living with Polio is a compelling history of the enduring physical and psychological experience of polio straight from the rarely heard voices of its survivors.

During the first half of the twentieth century, epidemics of polio caused fear and panic, killing some who contracted the disease, leaving others with varying degrees of paralysis. The defeat of polio became a symbol of modern technology's ability to reduce human suffering. But while the story of polio may have seemed to end on April 12, 1956, when the Salk vaccine was declared a success, millions of people worldwide are polio survivors. In this dazzling memoir, Anne Finger interweaves her personal experience with polio with a social and cultural history of the disease. Anne contracted polio as a very young child, just a few months before the Salk vaccine became widely available. After six months of hospitalization, she returned to her family's home in upstate New York, using braces and crutches. In her memoir, she writes about the physical expansiveness of her childhood, about medical attempts to "fix" her body, about family violence, job discrimination, and a life rich with political activism, writing, and motherhood. She also writes an autobiography of the disease, describing how it came to widespread public attention during a 1916 epidemic in New York in which immigrants, especially Italian immigrants, were scapegoated as being the vectors of the disease. She relates the key roles that Franklin Roosevelt played in constructing polio as a disease that could be overcome with hard work, as well as his ties to the nascent March of Dimes, the prototype of the modern charity. Along the way, we meet the formidable Sister Kenny, the Australian nurse who claimed to have found a revolutionary treatment for polio and who was one of the most admired women in America at mid-century; a group of polio survivors who formed the League of the Physically Handicapped to agitate for an end to disability discrimination in Depression-era relief projects; and the founders of the early disability-rights movement, many of them polio survivors who, having been raised to overcome obstacles and triumph over their disabilities, confronted a world filled with barriers and impediments that no amount of hard work could overcome. Anne Finger writes with the candor and the skill of a novelist, and shows not only how polio shaped her life, but how it shaped American cultural experience as well.

Summary somehow denotes that there is an end. This should only be the beginning. Depth Without Water should stimulate thought and cause the reader to produce positive thoughts and/or add on to their already-positive thoughts, that will in turn become positive actions. Depth Without Water is about the substance in the little things that we all have a tendency of taking for granted. The intensity of expression is a testament to how serious the so-called small things end up being. Of course this is only my take on the issues. If you disagree, please let me know. If you agree, then show the world your appreciation!