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NAPLES, Fla. (AP) — Wearing name tags, they sit around tables, with paper handouts full of research spread around them. Within reach are pens and paper.
Also within reach, on the floor, are crutches, walkers and wheelchairs.
Their attention is on Dr. Meg Lawton, a podiatrist discussing foot and ankle care. With the exception of one father who brought his daughter along, they are all over 60. But the conversation is not about aging. They have already faced many issues that others compatriots their age are just discovering.
The people in this group are confronting a different problem: Decades after recovering from the polio virus, its symptoms have sprung — or may spring at any time — back to life.
Most of them contracted polio as children or teenagers, and are now suffering its residual effects. The disease hibernates but rarely dies. Typically, post-polio symptoms begin to appear 30 to 40 years after the initial infection, generally affecting patients from 60 to 75 years old.
About 40 people attend the Naples Post-Polio Syndrome Support Group, which offers monthly meetings from November through April. Members gather on the first Saturday of the month inside the cafeteria at Physicians Regional Medical Center in North Naples.
The journey to the cafeteria from the hospital parking lot takes some members longer than others.
Post-Polio Syndrome affects the ability to walk in different ways. Some members get by with leg braces alone, some require a moving chair, some need the help from one crutch and others need two. "It's really nice to speak to this group because they are incredibly nice people," Lawton said.
The group's unofficial facilitator, Barbara Mayberry, greets everyone. She's a 68-year-old who loves to ride with her husband on their Harley-Davidson.
"I need a little help getting on, but once I am, I'm like everyone else," she said.
Mayberry has attended the meetings since the group was formed in 2003, when about 15 members met in a church off Crayton Road.
"It was a good indicator that there was a need in the community," Mayberry said.
The meeting location changed after the group outgrew its space, but the goal is the same: Sharing information that makes living with post-polio more manageable, something everyone can contribute to.
"We don't have titles here," Mayberry said. "I keep things simple and people can come if they want. You don't have to have polio to join. In the past we've had parents or family members of people with polio. Everyone is welcome."
Polio, short for Poliomyelitis, is an infectious disease that can attack motor neurons in the spinal cord and causes paralysis in arms and legs and breathing problems. It can also attack neurons responsible for sight, vision, taste, swallowing and breathing.
Polio was a dreaded disease until 1952 when a vaccine was created that reduced the number of U.S. cases of polio from nearly 60,000 to virtually zero, within two decades. Before that, it was the scourge of a generation, even afflicting the nation's longest serving president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Mayberry was one of nearly 58,000 Americans who contracted polio in 1952. She was 5.
She was treated in a room with glass windows all around so people could peer inside. The fishbowl type of treatment "might sound awful to people today, but that was the way things were. It was normal for the time, standard for people with polio," Mayberry said.
After six months, Mayberry walked out of the hospital with two leg braces and crutches. Polio had paralyzed her from the waist down, but physical therapy helped get her legs moving again.
Mayberry's mom worked with her to regain strength and eventually she shed her leg braces. She only needed crutches.
Mayberry would go on to marry her high school sweetheart, David, who told her she only needed one crutch — he would be her second one.
They gave birth to a son and, in 1987, they moved to Naples where Mayberry worked for the Collier County school district for 13 years.
Mayberry says that overcoming the ailments caused by PPS is mostly a mindset. "I think to myself, I can do this," she said.
On a recent Sunday, Naples PPS support group member Lorraine Tregde, 86, traded her walking sticks for a wheelchair and rode along pedestrian walkways in her community to the clubhouse for an annual art show. The building was popping with a lively crowd of Tregde's neighbors sharing their artwork.
"Isn't this wonderful?" Tregde declared.
As a member on the board of directors for the community, Tregde is a hit in the clubhouse. The week before, she lost grip on her crutch, straining her back in the fall, and recovery took her away from the normal out-and-about routine. Everyone wondered where she was.
"We fall," Tregde said. "Things like that happen."
A big part of Tregde's motivation has come from her attitude. Rather than perceiving her history with polio as something to overcome, or allowing it to close her off from things, she remains open to the special things that have come from it.
"You have to take what life gives you, and turn it into something positive," Tregde said. "Illness took me to a place where I discovered my interest in medicine."
Born in New York, and raised in Brooklyn, Tredge was diagnosed with polio at 17. She was told she would never walk again.
"Doctors told everyone with polio they wouldn't walk again," she said. But with time, physical therapy taught Tregde how to maneuver with braces. "One step in front of the other," she said.
Tregde went on to complete her undergraduate degree at St. John's University and a master's degree in education from New York University. She took the religious vows of the Roman Catholic Daughters of Wisdom and spent 20 years as a nun.
Her accomplishments are many and not limited to the 15 years she served as the senior executive with the NYC Health & Hospitals Corp., including appointments as executive director for seven major public hospitals.
Tregde has lived in Naples for 15 years. She speaks of her neighborhood with excitement, lifting her eyebrows while explaining the things she finds beautiful. A ride around her neighborhood. A swim in the afternoon. Reading the news in the morning.
It's a life of joy. Back in the cafeteria where the support group meets, members sit under motivational words like "respect," ''compassion," ''empathy," and "purpose." They are inscribed above them on the walls.
Before the meeting is over, Mayberry welcomes a new member, Anita Nordahl.
Fidgeting with her wedding band, Nordahl explains that she was 8 when she contracted polio. It paralyzed her on the left side of her body, and she spent several months in the hospital. After a few surgeries, Nordahl left treatment without leg braces. She married and had three kids.
But when she was 40, she fell down a set of stairs and that set off a chain reaction of health nightmares. The alignment of her legs were never the same. She had hip surgery at 50 and soon after started walking with a cane. She feels the deterioration of her body — but also the support of her husband, who walks beside her.
Her story, like those of so many others in the support group, define what it takes to live with Post-Polio Syndrome.
"Polio doesn't define us because providence brought us there," Tregde said. "We made the best of it."
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Information from: Naples (Fla.) Daily News, http://www.naplesnews.com
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