英语阅读：My Father Gave Me Life Twice

Children were dying - dropping like flies, people whispered in fearful tones. In some places, hospitals were so crowed that beds, overflowing the wards, spilled out into hallways and lined the walls, each bed bearing the paralyzed form of a child.

Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine wasn't available until 195. Too late for me. Polio invaded my body one summer, I was eight years old. I had contracted bulbar poliomyelitis, the worst type. The disease attacked my central nervous system. It began with choking, followed by a total inability to swallow. Soon the dreaded paralysis, crept into my neck, legs and right arm.

My parents were advised that I would not live. By morning, they were told, they would no longer have a daughter. But the doctors wouldn't let them spend the night with me. There were just too many people in the overcrowed building.

My mother and father went back to their small, two-bedroom home in Michigan. They gently laid my three-year-old brother in his crib, in the same room that contained my now-empty bed. Then they sat awake, side by side, on the couch in the living room. My mother spent the entire night comforting my father. For the first and only in their lives, she saw her husband cry.

Balancing Act. At dawn they drove in stoic silence to the hospital. On the night my father cried, I lay unconscious with a fever of 108 degrees Fahrenheit. An old nurse - pulled out of retirement - recognized me by my name tag as the granddaughter of an old friend. She placed me in a bathtub with ice to reduce the temperature. Then, fighting exhaustion, she stayed awake by my side for 48 critical hours until the fever broke.

I was transferred to a ward with 20 other girls who were ravaged by polio. The disease damaged many parts of my body, but the worst havoc was wrought on my spine, near the neck. I could not lift my head from the bed.

The doctors told my parents that, with therapy, I would probably regain the use of my arm and legs. But I would have to wear a neck brace for the rest of my life and go to a special school for crippled children.

"No," was my father's answer to a life of pity and dependence. "My daughter will never go to that school." His little girl would not live out her life in braces.

My father, Leland Holmes Whipple, had no more than a high-school education, but he read everything he could find on infantile paralysis. He talked to doctors, nurses and therapists, and concluded that if my muscles could be exercised artificially, permanent atrophy might not take place. An osteopath agreed, and my father vowed to remove me from the hospital as soon as possible to get that therapy. He instructed me, however, to do everything the medical doctors in the hospital told me - to the best of my ability. This was nothing new; my father had always taught me to be my best self.

Over the months I saw man little girls leave. In wheelchairs. But my father promised me we would walk out together. I never heard "if you get well" from him. It was always "when you get well."

I contrived method of sitting up for a couple of minutes at a time. I had studied ballet since the age of three, and somehow I'd flip upright and balance my head and neck on my shoulders to prove that I was getting better. The doctors knew it was just a stunt, but my father loved it.

I had two goals. One: get home fast. Two: even enough money to buy a doll like the one another girl in my ward had. I'd never liked dolls particularly, but this one was different; you could wash her hair! My father sensed that purpose of any kind would give me a feeling of control. So he brought me a toy chewing gum machine, and I sold the chewing gum for a penny to anyone who passed my bed, to amass the funds to purchase that doll.

I couldn't walked out of the hospital, and I was mortified. My father apologized - it was his fault, not mine, he said. But he didn't make me go in a wheelchair like the others. He carried me in his arms. I wore a new pink bathrobe my mother had made.

Doing My Job. I had studied piano since age five. The first day home, my father sat me on his lap at the piano, supporting my head against his chest, and placed my hands on the keyboard. My right hand slipped from the keys. "It's all right," he assured me firmly. "You'll be playing soon enough."

Dr. Frederick Taylor, the osteopath, came every morning to work on my muscles, especially the neck. A tutor came every afternoon, my father promised I would return to school. My job was to walk, to write with my right hand and to hold my head up before the end of the school year.

Coming home from work many times a day, m father laid me across the piano bench and forced me to lift sandbags placed on my forehead, arm and legs. One major neck muscle had atrophied, so I worked to strengthen the others to compensate. Some of our neighbors wouldn't speak to my father, because they heard my cries as he helped me. They didn't understand that he did it out of love. But I did.

I watched the seasons pass, propped up on a couch on our glassed-in front porch. I saw the other kids rake autumn leaves, then build snowmen and soon roller skate past my window as trees turned green again. I never doubted that I would be right there with them next year.

After some time, Dr. Taylor came only three times a week. Then, little by little, I began to hold my head up all by myself. I was now walking rather well. I could write slowly and had even plunked out a few piano notes.

Next came a mirror (my father's idea, of course) at my place on the dinner table. Much of my swallowing mechanism had been paralyzed - it still is - and in order to eat, I had to turn my head all the way to the right to swallow. Viewing myself in the mirror, I practiced holding my head straight until I mastered eating without seeming to look out the window with every bite. To this day, I still turn my head ever so slightly to swallow, but it is imperceptible. All because of that mirror.

School was nearly out. I was weak and very thin. Representatives of the school board, observing my slowness and pallor informed my father that I was not well enough to return. Why bother for two weeks?

My father marched straight to the principal - a woman who had been his fourth-grade teacher - and begged her. "We've got to help my daughter start feeling normal again," he insisted. "Returning to school is her reward for all her work."

I was given a chance. My mother made me a new plaid dress, and I wrote red ribbons on my braids. But my sunken cheeks and knobby knees embarrassed me.

The father girl in my class taunted me because I was skinny which hurt my feelings, though I didn't let anyone suspect. But my secret boyfriend stunk one of my blond braids in his water colors and made me feel like a member of the group again. I passed my tests at the top of the class, and walked out of school for summer vacation with the rest of kids.

But my "work" wasn't nearly finished.

Over and Past. My father owned a small sheet-metal company and was barely managing financially. He was eligible for help from a charity for polio victims, but he never took any money from them. He did contribute to that organization for the rest of his life.

That summer my father went further into debt to purchase a lot on a lake. He built a cottage with his own hands so I could have water therapy every day. He taught me how to swim, to improve my overall condition. He decided sailing would be god for my arms. So he fixed up an old sailboat and set out to master the art himself first. I will never forget the sight of him heading off from the dock, the boat under full sail, with the book How to Sail in Six Easy Steps in his hands ... and capsizing within 60 seconds, to howls of laughter from all of us on shore.

He finally did teach me to sail, and also how to water-ski, to strengthen my arms and legs. Then to bring grace to my body movements and peace to my spirit, he showed me fly casting in the early glow of a shimmering sunrise.

My father got up at five o'clock every morning of the week that summer to commute to the city, while the rest of us stayed at the lake to finish my "job".

The next autumn, I resumed ballet and piano lessons. My dance teacher didn't think I was ready, but my father convinced her otherwise.

By the time I entered junior high school two years later, I was normal. "You'll be meeting lots of new kids who know nothing of your illness," my father counseled. "Never tell anyone about it. It's over and past." Suffering didn't matter to my father. Getting over it did. I took his advice. To this day, very few people, even close friends, know about this event in my life.

"Thank you, Daddy." My 18th birthday came one day in late November. At the end of the day I was in my bedroom. Staring at my bare neck in the dressing-table mirror, I imagined what it would look like encased in leather and steel, I rushed straight to my parent's bedroom and knocked urgently on the door. When my father opened it, I ran, sobbing, into his arms. "Thank you, Daddy, for giving me life... twice." He only smiled and hugged me. We never spoke of it again.

My father died at age 61. But he lived to see me, an honor student, dance and sing my way through high school, teaching ballet to put myself through Michigan State University. Instead of braces on my necks, he saw crowns placed on my head when I won various beauty-pageant competitions.

He walked me down the aisle and gave me away in marriage. He saw me perform in TV commercials, heard me on my network radio show, and read my health and beauty books as I enjoyed a public career that would have been impossible if he hadn't said "no" to polio.

Most of all, he watched me grow into the kind of woman he always meant for his little girl to be. Healthy. Happy. And, thanks to him, holding my head high.