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

chance of recovery depends partly on the state of the patient’s mind. If the patient loses hope, the body seems to lose hope, too. But if a patient is optimistic and determined, sometimes the body follows the mind’s lead.

So Dr. Lovett spoke truthfully. But he also gave the Roosevelts reason to hope.

Compared to the worst cases he’d seen, this one was fairly mild, even “within the range of possible complete recovery,” he said.

A few days later, Dr. Lovett described his talk with the Roosevelts in a letter to their personal doctor in New York. Lovett wrote: “I told them very frankly that no one could tell where they stood, that the case was evidently not of the severest type, that complete or partial recovery to any point was possible.”

He also told the Roosevelts that “disability was not to be feared.”

Now, Dr. Lovett was well aware that some degree of disability was quite possible. So he must have meant only that complete disability was not to be feared. That is, FDR would not have to stay flat on his back for the rest of his life. Eventually he’d be able to get up and move around, though probably with metal braces on his legs and crutches.

Eleanor was anxious about her children. Were they in danger?

Almost surely not, Lovett said. The flu-like symptoms that Louis Howe had noticed in the children after FDR’s arrival might have been caused by the poliovirus. But if so, the children’s immune systems had fought it off. And now their father was no longer contagious.

Dr. Lovett said FDR would have to rest at Campobello for several weeks before going home to New York. In the meantime, Eleanor should stop the painful massage. It was doing no good. In fact, it might be damaging FDR’s muscles. After a few weeks they would see where things stood, then decide what to do next.

Dr. Lovett said he was very sorry, but the only thing to do was to wait and see what would happen. The worst would soon be over. At that point FDR could expect to feel some strength returning in the damaged muscles.

The doctor got ready to leave. Louis Howe asked him for a private word.

Howe wanted a straight answer to the hardest question: What were the chances that FDR would walk again?

Lovett decided to level with Howe.

It was just barely possible, he said. It would take “the most extraordinary will and patience” over a long period of time—“hours, days, weeks, months and years of constant effort.”

And even if FDR worked that hard for that long, Lovett said, no one could guarantee he would ever again walk on his own.

Chapter 3“HARD, CRUEL FACTS”

Day after day FDR lay in his bed, waiting.

He listened as Howe read aloud from the newspapers. When Eleanor came in to wash him or to help him relieve himself in a bedpan, all he could do was push his body up a bit from the bed with his hands and arms. Again and again he tried to move his legs. Nothing.

Another man who had polio described what this felt like. “You drive the thought of it with all your might down from your mind toward the lifeless leg,” he wrote. “But the thought doesn’t get there. Some deadly barrier lies between.”

It was like what happens when you sleep half the night with your arm pinned under you. When you wake up, the arm feels heavy and dead, as if a big bag of sand has been tied to your body.

The quiet days passed. Eleanor let the children come to the door of FDR’s bedroom to say hello and chat for a minute.

“He grinned at us,” Jimmy Roosevelt remembered, “and he did his best to call out, or gasp out, some cheery response to our tremulous, just-this-side-of-tears greetings.”

Eleanor and Louis broke the news to a few close relatives and friends in careful letters. Howe sent a brief notice to the newspapers saying only that FDR had been “seriously ill” but was “now improving.”

Howe was keeping back the whole truth partly because FDR’s mother, Sara Roosevelt, was about to set sail for the United States after a summer in Europe. They didn’t want Sara to be shocked by a newspaper story saying FDR had infantile paralysis.

When making any family decision, Franklin and Eleanor had to think carefully about his mother.

Since the death of her husband, James Roosevelt, when Franklin was in college, Sara had been a wealthy woman. She had inherited her husband’s substantial fortune and the estate on the Hudson River. This was the place FDR considered his true home, and the whole family—Sara, Franklin, Eleanor, and the children—spent many weekends and holidays there together. But Franklin’s work as a politician and lawyer required a base in New York City, too. So their main address was 49 East Sixty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, a fine, six-story townhouse. Sara had given that house to the couple as a wedding gift and then moved in next door at No. 47, with doors connecting the twin houses on alternate floors.

The bonds between Sara and “my children,” as she called Franklin and Eleanor, were strong but often strained. Sara covered many of the family’s expenses, which gave her a silent source of power in many family decisions. And she worried about the welfare of her only child as if he were still a boy in school. If Franklin—a grown man with five children of his own—said he was about to leave the house on a rainy day, Sara would warn him that he must wear his rubber boots.

So they had to think carefully about how Sara would learn that her son was half-paralyzed, and they certainly didn’t want her to read about it in the newspapers.

They had to tell other friends and associates, too, though how much they said depended on the person.

To FDR’s secretary, a highly capable young woman named Marguerite LeHand, Eleanor wrote only that her husband had caught “a severe chill … which