Polio....

Polio.....

The other evening, my family was discussing  childhood vaccinations. Babies still receive them  which helps not only themselves but those around them...

I remember as a child, going to a small rural school. We were bussed about 20 miles away to a larger school where we stood in long slow moving lines awaiting our shots.  I hated shots so much and still do not like them even after years of practice...I was only 6 or 7 years old and my parents weren't with me, other children were crying and screaming as we passed through the nurses who were administering those dreaded shots..on our way back to our seats in the busses...that was the method then of getting shots against the dreaded disease of polio...

During that time, as well, I was scheduled for a tonsillectomy...they were continually inflamed and I visited the doctor countless times as well as home visits for tonsillitis...so the plan was to have them removed...

We arrived at the hospital only to be turned away due to the capacity filling of the rooms with polio patients...I remember being overjoyed and scared at the same time...the tonsillectomy was rescheduled in another hospital.

Polio was a worldwide problem and we all knew someone who was affected by this horrible disease...we saw pictures of people in "iron lungs" or saw them in the hospital...machines that would breath for the patients, wheel chairs to help people become mobile after losing their limbs to the ravages of the disease...and now these people have brittle bones which break easily from the after affects...

It was no laughing matter....

Wikipedia, "Polio (also called poliomyelitis) is a contagious, historically devastating disease that was virtually eliminated from the Western hemisphere in the second half of the 20th century. Although polio has been around since ancient times, its most extensive outbreak occurred in the first half of the 1900s until the polio vaccine was introduced in 1955.

At the height of the polio epidemic in 1952, nearly 60,000 cases with more than 3,000 deaths were reported in the United States alone. However, with widespread vaccination, wild-type polio, or polio occurring through natural infection, was eliminated from the United States by 1979 and the Western hemisphere by 1991."

We have had many diseases over the eons of time, the plague, yellow fever, AIDS, Ebola,  leprosy...to name a few...some are lifestyle choices, while others are mysteries...some have said they are God's judgements, but mostly they are part of our dying planet and the natural consequences of death in our bodies...God allows them to get our attention to focus on Him (my opinion)...He can heal as He chooses...He makes those choices...he has provided the science of medicine and research to find cures for some and not others...

We are in His hands...thank YOU that we can find comfort in You through the afflictions that we face...

Job 36:15 But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering;he speaks to them in their affliction.

Lamentations 3:33 For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone. 

Romans 12:12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. 

2 Corinthians 4:16-17 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.