Who wants to be First

Mostly, I like to be first. Well, except in grammar school when at the beginning of each school year, I got an earnest lecture from my newest teacher about how I would have to be brave and set an example for the rest of the children. See, my name was Adkins so I was always first in line for all the shots we got each year. I have no idea what they were, but small pox, measles, and a whole lot of other innoculations that haven't been seen in schools for a while, I'm guessing. It was during one of those brave days that I got the polio vaccine and caught polio. There is no way to prove that I got it from the shot, but so did a couple of kids who got the shot from the same people on the same day. Back then, nobody thought of suing people who hurt you in that way , so my grandmother never thought of suing the school, suing the medical people, suing Dr. Salk--as would be the case now. If she had, I would own Kentucky. But no matter. My polio was way better that the beautiful Martha McIntire, who spent the rest of her life in an iron lung, right in the house next door to me. What happened with me was no fun, but I recovered with few damages, stenosis of the spine, left leg shorter than the right and atrophied muscles in the left side of my back. Now all of you who know me have never noticed these shortcomings. I always work hard at appearing normal with varying degrees of success when it comes to both mental and physical. But the reason that I've been absent from posting the past little while is that I've been trying to get through this latest polio dance. It's called post-polio syndrome and many are suffering now. Symptoms include slowly progressive muscle weakness, unaccustomed fatigue (both generalized and muscular), and, at times, muscle atrophy. Pain from joint degeneration and increasing skeletal deformities such as scoliosis are common. Nobody seems to know why it comes back, but there are support groups and the like for it. But me, I'm not going to go to any support group, every time I feel weepy or pissed off, I think about Martha. I'm lucky Ruth Adkins Robinson.