Polio: The forgotten disease
It’s a disease often thought of in the past tense, but in Mervyn Dykes’ new book, polio is put very much into the spotlight. Carly Thomas listens to his story.
‘‘Society heaved a sigh of relief believing that polio was eradicated and there was no need to think about it any more.’’
Mervyn Dykes carries a walking stick and getting around doesn’t come easy for him. He has the voice of an actor, smooth and vigorous, and when you listen to him tell his story of polio, you can hear this man is strong.
He was a go-getter, an actor and a journalist with ambition, cunning and talent.
Dykes, 76, contracted polio when he was 7-years-old, in the prevaccine days of the late 1940s, but he never displayed any symptoms.
He saw himself as one of the lucky ones and he says no-one really talked about the disease.
For others, the outcome was paralysis and death, and the frightened picture society painted of those struck down by it was of a sickly cripple.
But Dykes was just a kid living a carefree Kiwi existence, where he says the summers seemed to last forever.
He went through his early adulthood with just as much gusto as his childhood. A physical person, who set himself running goals, he competed in discus against the prevailing Wellington winds and played many sports.
Dykes’ first foray into journalism was covering sports and he went on to work in Canadian newspapers and then back here at The Dominion and the Manawatu¯ Standard.
He covered everything, won many awards and had a reputation for being able to write fast and well. Dykes was ambitious, driven and relentless.
And then it happened. The quiet, back-burning disease of his childhood snuck up on him. Post Polio Syndrome (PPS) struck about 10 years ago and slowly but surely, symptoms started to arrive into his everyday.
‘‘Everything hurt and I had a lot of mental confusion. I lost my ability to read and write, which was a hard thing for me. I thought: ‘Hey, you have my body, now leave my mind alone’.’’
Dykes says he became affected by stress, a major trigger for PPS, and at the time of his son’s death things started to really escalate.
His left forearm stopped working, his back ached and standing for more than 10 minutes was a struggle. His knees were no longer guaranteed to support him and Dykes’ daily life was getting more and more pressed upon by polio.
He was frustrated and angry and this confident, capable man was also confused and scared.
And this is when he had an experience that eventually led to him writing his book, Polio and Me.
This self-proclaimed stubborn and independent man admitted he needed help.
Dykes met Raylee Murphy from Polio New Zealand, before he had started to suffer from PPS, when he wrote an article about the anniversary of the Salk Polio vaccine.
When he mentioned to her that he had had polio too, Dykes says her questions of: ‘‘How’s your back? How are you arms, your legs? Do you have difficulty breathing?’’ irked him. He was fine and he told her so.
But then he wasn’t and in desperation Dykes went to her for help. He needed someone to talk to and talk he did.
‘‘I started to unload all these problems I was having and I basically told her it was all a personal conspiracy and she gave me a one-word answer.’’
‘‘Bulls...’’ said the straighttalking Murphy. And Dykes says it was just what he needed.
Although polio was different for different people, at its centre it was the same disease, and what he was experiencing wasn’t as bad as what some people were.
She was wonderfully direct and Murphy also told Dykes to go to the Queen Elizabeth specialist hospital in Rotorua.
He followed her advice and not only was it a trip that helped him immensely, it set him on a path of learning how to not just manage his polio, but it also gave him the impetus to write his book.
While there, crucially, he met others going through a similar thing. They talked, compared notes and gave each other that wonderful human connection of understanding. Dykes says one of the worst things about having a disease like polio is that it can isolate.
‘‘We tend to lock ourselves away a bit. It’s hard to go out, so why bother? We withdraw, we feel alone and that is sad.’’
And so Dykes has extended a hand.
He learnt to write again, encouraged by the staff at the hospital. He did what he used to do – he set himself word counts and deadlines and he got determined and stubborn again.
He has written a number of books, but this one is perhaps the most pertinent. It tells his story, plainly and without apology.
Polio is a disease that has been forgotten about, says Dykes, and along with that so have the sufferers.
‘‘Society heaved a sigh of relief believing that polio was eradicated and there was no need to think about it anymore. The health professionals who treated polio so long ago have died off and there has been little or no research for 50 years into the effects polio had on these survivors.
‘‘Many hoped the whole issue of polio would go away. However, there are still hundreds if not thousands of people who had polio before the vaccinations who are still living with the late effects of
His book is for them, with some solid advice on where and how to get help, and it’s a firm mark made on a page by a man who’s whole outlook on life has changed.
It’s one more thing as well, whether he meant it to be or not: Dykes’ book is a testimony to the way the human spirit can find new ways to be happy, creative ways to carve out a life worth living and how one directly spoken word was enough to shake up a person’s whole view of existence.