Patrick Parks is author of a novel, Tucumcari, and has had fiction, poetry, reviews and interviews appear or forthcoming in a number of places, most recently The Writing Disorder, TYPO, Change Seven, Ocotillo Review, Bridge Eight, and Full Stop. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop and lives with his wife near Chicago. More at patrick-parks.com.

In the summer of 1954, when I was 18 months old, I got sick with what must have, at first, looked like the flu, but the symptoms grew worse and my parents, aware of the epidemic affecting the country, took me to the local hospital where I was diagnosed with poliomyelitis, which later was also known as infantile paralysis because of the number of children affected.

I, of course, remember almost nothing of this time, though my earliest memory occurred then. It was night, and I was lying in the back seat of our family car. It had to have been after my being quarantined at the hospital. My father was driving, and his and my mother’s silhouettes stood out clearly against the smudged windshield, perhaps lit by headlights coming at us. They were talking. I presumed later that they were discussing me and my future, though I have no proof of that.

We were living in Eagle Grove, Iowa, at the time. My father was a circulation manager for the Des Moines Register, and they were renting a house. Just before I got sick, my father had assembled a swing set in the backyard. When we got home after my hospitalization, he went out into the yard and destroyed it.

The way I describe polio in my non-medical way is that it is a virus which affects the nerves, particularly those of the spine, and essentially eats away the sheath (the myelin) that protects those nerves, resulting in the loss of electrical impulses to the muscles and, in many cases—including my own—a permanent “deformation.” In my case, my left leg is about a half-inch shorter than my right, with about two-thirds of the muscle. This means I have spent more than 70 years with a limp.

But, as I said at the outset, I was one of the lucky ones. Given what other polio victims endured, I really can’t complain much. I was never as fast as other kids when I was growing up, and, when I was a teen, I was self-conscious about wearing shorts in the summer. Because I grew up in a small town, and everyone knew I’d had polio, I was not bullied or belittled; I was accepted as unfortunate. In college, I was able to get a small amount of disability money to help with tuition.

From 1948-1955, about 16,000 people died in the U.S. each year, most of them children. In 1952, the worst year, there were 57,628 cases. Of those, 3,145 died, and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. After the development of the vaccine in 1955 (ironically, for me, less than a year after I contracted the disease), with a better version developed in 1961, the number of cases began to drop substantially, and by 1999, the disease was effectively eradicated in this country—and eradicated in the memory of it from those who weren’t around to remember what it was like.

Which leads me to this moment when Florida, at the urging of the state’s surgeon general—who calls mandatory vaccinations “immoral” and declares the mandate a form of slavery—plans to end mandatory vaccinations. With this ill-guided and ignorant decision, we could see a return of polio. And it wouldn’t just be in Florida. Think of how many people vacation there each year, people who may not believe in vaccinations, people who might—if polio emerges in that state, as it very well could—expose their children to the virus and take it back home where there are other vaccine skeptics with unprotected children. This is how a new epidemic could spread, and it wouldn’t take long.

I am a polio survivor. I hate to think that in 50 years, there may be a new generation saying that.