Fisher, Ann - Cerro Gordo County

General Comments:

I was four when my family moved back to Mason City from California. I know we lived with my Grandmother for a time when we came back and it was during that time that my aunt became ill. She and I had become fast friends and I remember being able to make her laugh easily. When she got sick, though, I remember distinctly sitting on her bed trying everything to make her laugh. She couldn't, and I was heartbroken. My memory of the day she went to the hospital was of men in white coats coming through the front door and asking her to allow them to assist her to the ambulance (by wheelchair or gurney I don't remember), but she refused and said she would walk out on her own.

She lived less than 24 hours after she left the house. The hospital diagnosed her with the Bulbar strain of polio and even with the aid of an iron lung, could not save her.

In retrospect, I don't remember any of the family being worried about my catching polio but they may have been and I was too young to know it.

About six years later, I remember my mother standing in the doorway of our house and yelling out, "They've found it! They have a vaccine for polio!"  She was not a woman given to such outbursts and shortly after that, she took me, my sisters and brother to a doctor in the Brick and Tile Building where we were given our first dose of the vaccine.