He Caught Polio at Five. His Body Has Not Forgotten.

Cedar Valley News
May 2, 2026
He Caught Polio at Five. His Body Has Not Forgotten.
By Dr. Aisha Khalid

Patrick Crago was five years old in 1950 when he caught polio. There was no vaccine. The disease paralyzed both his legs, one arm, and part of his torso. He spent the first three months in a hospital, isolated from his family. He spent more than nine months in a rehabilitation center, learning to walk with crutches. He has been in a wheelchair since his mid-fifties.

He is in his late seventies now. He carries this in his body every day.

Diane Roberto was eleven in 1955 when she caught polio — just months before the vaccine went public. She has used a wheelchair ever since. She said this week: ” We need to delve into our history, and see what a difference modern medicine has made in our lives.”

Both of them are now members of Grandparents for Vaccines, a network founded in Cleveland by Dr. Arthur Lavin, a retired pediatrician. They speak publicly about what these diseases did to their bodies, hoping Cedar Valley — hoping anyone — will hear them.

I am a physician. I have been practicing for twenty years. In twenty years, I have never treated a case of polio. I have never seen an iron lung. I have never watched a child lose the use of his legs to a disease for which there was no recourse. I have never had to tell a family their child will spend the next nine months in rehabilitation learning to walk with crutches.

I have never had to do any of this because a vaccine made it unnecessary. I trained in medicine, having already solved certain problems. Those problems are not theoretical to me, exactly — I learned them in textbooks — but they are not in my hands the way they are in Patrick Crago’s hands, or in Diane Roberto’s.

Dr. Lavin said something worth repeating. He said grandparents are among the most enduring reservoirs of trust in an age when trust is hard to come by. Most people believe grandparents love their grandchildren. And the grandparents’ generation lived before certain vaccines existed. They know what these diseases do. They are terrified their grandchildren may be forced to endure what they endured.

Patrick Crago was five. Diane Roberto was eleven. The vaccine was five years too late for one and a few months too late for the other. This is not a political statement. It is a calendar. It is the distance between a child’s body and the thing coming toward it, and whether what stands between them is there in time.

I think about my patients. I think about the children I see every week in Cedar Valley. I think about what it would mean to learn, years from now, one of them spent nine months in rehabilitation learning to walk with crutches because of something preventable. I think about what it would cost a family. I think about what it would cost the child’s body, which, as Patrick Crago demonstrates, does not forget.

He is speaking now because he was five years old in 1950, and the vaccine was not available. He is seventy-six years past the child he was, and the paralysis is still in his body, and he is still trying to tell someone what it cost him.

I am a physician. I am also a mother, a person of faith, and someone who believes the stories we carry in our bodies are worth telling. Patrick Crago and Diane Roberto are telling theirs. I am listening. Cedar Valley should, too.

If you’d like to respond to this editorial, go to the Cedar Valley News Facebook group, where the conversation continues. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Patrick Crago, Diane Roberto, Dr. Arthur Lavin, and Grandparents for Vaccines are real, as reported by Grant Segall in The Land on May 1, 2026.

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