BY Emmy Lou Cholak
It was in the late 1940’s and I was working as a nurse on the acute contagion ward of Cleveland City Hospital. I was not a trained nurse, but there was nurse shortage and I received training while a first-year medical student.
I’ll never forget the day this boy came into the hospital ward, stiff as a board. He was about 10. If you could put a hand under his head and one under his heels, he would lie stiff with an upward arch between those two supports. All his muscles were tightly contracted, never to relax. How did he breathe? With great difficulty because his chest muscles and diagram couldn’t relax enough to let air in. He had a mask on which pushed air into him until the permanent breathing machines could be readied for him.
He was a treated with a shot of strychnine, the poison put on poisoned darts to kill enemies, or prey, by paralyzing them. He was, as soon as possible, placed in an “iron lung” that would take over the breathing for him. His color returned gradually. Gratefully, he was unconscious through all of this painful life-threatening situation.
Why was he stiff as a board and unable to move his chest muscles to breathe? He had never had a tetanus vaccine, one of the required “baby“ shots. He had tetanus, “lockjaw.” His life was saved with a drug that could kill you, strychnine, which paralyzed all his muscles, letting the machine breathe for him.
The doctors searched his body for the culprit of this infection. A small, old splinter was found in his right anterior forearm. It was surgically, diligently removed, but the poison causing the killing contractions of his muscles would have to be gradually expelled and treated with anti-toxins. He was in an iron lung for weeks, a month or more. He was fed through a tube to his stomach and was mostly unconscious.
It seemed unbelievable, but months later he walked out of the hospital, much thinner, limping, but conscious. He would have a life with limitations and future pains, but he could talk and walk that day. All he had been through, and being handicapped for the rest of his life, was due to a tiny splinter in his right forearm. It carried Clostridium tetani, a natural-occurring bacteria which produces the toxin, tetanospamin, causing continual painful contractions of the muscles until death. All this could have been prevented by having had the “baby shots.”
At the same time in that city hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, there were several children with mumps encephalitis, swelling of the brain causing brain damage or death. There were children dying of systemic measles. Some survived these illnesses, but had lasting complications like blindness, deafness, mental retardation.
There was an adult with chicken pox. Her chest X-ray showed the same pox lesions that you see on the skin. Her unstoppable coughing caused petechiae, small blood-vessel breakages throughout her brain, leaving lasting brain damaging strokes. All of this pain and suffering and death due to not receiving preventive “baby shots.”
Vaccines are known to prevent many terrible illnesses — and without deleterious side effects. Ask your doctor and listen to proven scientific evidence.
Remain well with a scientifically proven, preventive medical shot.
About the author: Northern Michigan resident Emmy Lou Cholak is a longtime social justice activist and retired physician who worked in public health for many years. She went on a medical mission to Haiti after the earthquake and has seen diseases and deaths that could have been prevented with mandated vaccines.