Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

was lucky. In his case, those muscles regained their strength in just a few weeks. But he still needed help when he had to urinate or defecate.

In fact, he needed a helper nearby day and night. When he wanted to eat, someone had to bring him food. When he wanted to read a book, someone had to fetch it from the shelf. He couldn’t change his clothes without assistance. If he were to fall, he would stay on the floor until someone came. If there were a fire, he couldn’t escape by himself. So he could never enjoy total solitude and privacy. He may have felt as many people feel when paralyzed—like an infant in the body of an adult.

A historian named Daniel Wilson, who had polio himself, talked to many men who, like FDR, had been struck by polio as adults. “In their own eyes,” Wilson wrote, “and often in the attitudes and words of their nurses and attendants, they had been reduced to the condition of babies. Like babies, they could do little for themselves, but they never completely lost their sense of manhood, and the incongruity between their treatment and a sense of self added to their pain.”

When you’re paralyzed, even loved ones begin to treat you differently, as if you are some strange new person they hardly know. People who talk to you, even good friends, don’t know what to say. After polio struck FDR, a friend of the family couldn’t even compose a letter to Eleanor. “I have tried hard to write you,” she finally explained after months of delay, “but I simply did not know how to express my feelings.”

People with permanent paralysis seldom want their loved ones to know how frightened they feel. Many cover up their feelings with jokes and cheerfulness that’s only half-sincere. FDR did that a lot, and Eleanor knew it. She once wrote: “There were certain things that he never really talked about—that he would just shut up, and it made him very, very much alone in some ways.”

The normal and natural thing to do in this situation is simply to say, “Well, I guess I have to live with this for a while, but it’s only going to be temporary. I’ll get over it.”

That’s exactly what Dr. Draper had told the reporters. So that’s what FDR said to everyone in the letters he dictated while lying on his back in his hospital bed.

“I am well ahead of the record-breaking schedule I have set out to maintain in recovery,” he wrote to a good friend in Hyde Park. To a friend in Washington, D.C., he wrote: “I am still just as much of an optimist as ever, and I appear to have inspired the doctors with a certain amount of optimism as well, as they are most encouraging as to the future.”

It was the same with visiting relatives and friends. A reporter who talked to several of them later remarked that “Roosevelt gaily brushed aside every hint of condolence and sent them away more cheerful … None of them heard him utter a complaint or a regret or even acknowledge that he had had so much as a bit of hard luck.” When his old boss at the Navy Department, Josephus Daniels, came to FDR’s bedside, Roosevelt threw a playful punch at Daniels’s chest. “You thought you were coming to see an invalid!” he said with a laugh.

But in one joking letter from the hospital, there was a hint that he knew the truth might not be so rosy. FDR had just read an article in the New York Times about Dr. Draper’s remarks to the press. He dictated a note to the famous publisher of the Times, Adolph Ochs, whom he knew.

“While the doctors were unanimous in telling me that the attack was very mild and that I was not going to suffer any permanent effects from it,” he told Ochs, “I had, of course, the usual dark suspicion that they were just saying nice things to make me feel good, but now that I have seen the same statement officially made in the New York Times I feel immensely relieved because I know of course it must be so.”

Chapter 4“HE’S THROUGH”

Every day, Dr. Draper dropped by Presbyterian Hospital to see how his patient was doing.

Still too weak in his lower back to sit up, FDR would talk and talk and talk, telling Draper he planned to be up on crutches within a couple of weeks, leave the hospital, and then begin a hard program of exercise. He’d be walking on his own in no time.

As he chattered on, Dr. Draper would listen, all the while watching the movements of Roosevelt’s arms and back, placing his hands on a muscle here and a muscle there, asking FDR to try moving this or that. The doctor had to be very gentle. It was now nearly two months since the poliovirus had struck, but many of FDR’s muscles were still painfully tender.

Dr. Draper was looking for any signs that paralyzed muscles were coming back to life on their own. He was hoping that healthy nerve cells were starting to take up the slack for cells killed by the virus.

The doctor saw promising signals in the arms and chest. His patient could now hold a pen and sign his name to a letter. He could reach up and grasp a heavy strap over his bed and pull himself up so the nurses could change his sheets or give him a sponge bath. This gave FDR “a great sense of satisfaction,” Draper noted. Still, certain muscles in the shoulders and arms remained weak.

Below FDR’s chest, Dr. Draper saw only bad news. In the lower back and buttocks—essential for standing, walking, and sitting up—the muscles had withered. The legs, feet, and toes presented “a most depressing picture,” Dr. Draper wrote to Dr. Lovett. FDR could make certain toes twitch just a little. But he couldn’t move his