Replies

It was famously the case with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who needed a wheelchair after he contracted the disease.

From claude.ai

However, there's a meaningful medical controversy worth knowing about. A 2003 retrospective analysis published in the Journal of Medical Biography by Dr. Armond Goldman and colleagues reexamined FDR's case using modern diagnostic criteria and concluded that his symptoms were more consistent with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) — an autoimmune disorder that attacks the peripheral nervous system — rather than poliomyelitis. Their reasoning centered on several details from the 1921 case:

The onset pattern (symmetric ascending paralysis, starting in the legs and moving upward) fits GBS more closely than typical polio presentation Facial paralysis and prolonged numbness/sensory disturbances, which occurred in FDR's case, are more characteristic of GBS than polio His age (39) was atypical for polio, which predominantly struck children and young adults, whereas GBS shows no such age bias The specific progression and recovery pattern described by contemporary physicians aligns better with GBS's known course

My late wife born in 1950 was stricken in 1985 with sudden onset of at first with almost total paralysis within a couple hours. For over a week her arms were clutched to her chest. I rushed her to the ER when it hit her in a mall. She had walked in and sat down at the food court and when she tried to get up she fell to the floor. In the ER, ICU, and next next year or more they could not figure it out even the best Neurologist in Tennessee couldn't. They first said GB however her respiratory system was not affected. Then they about a year later said Transverse Myelitis. She had become a C/5 C/6 incomplete quadriplegic. Fair use of arms and hands, weak but functional, near normal feeling in all extremities, but no leg function.

A few years later she was being measured for her second motorized wheelchair and the PT doing it caught the problem by the measurements she was getting in limb lengths. They said it was consistent with Polio. It's believed as a toddler she likely had a milder case of it. However when she was 35 she was living under great stress, a 4' 10" woman weighing 90 lbs soaking wet working as a CNA lifting patients far more that her own weight. Her husband had abandoned her with two teen daughters and she was not eating right which weakened her and triggered Polio Round 2 in her body.

She was divorced when we met in 85 and we married in the hospital during her initial 6 month stay with her being given a 5 year or less survival time prognoses. We were married for a few months short of 30years when The Lord called her home from a bout on Pneumonia they could not cure due to contortion of her body partially blocking a lung not allowing them to get her fully suctioned.