CLEARWATER, Fla. — As Florida seeks to become the first state to end all childhood vaccine mandates, the Tampa Bay 28 I-Team met with two women who say they are "disgusted" and "infuriated" by what they are seeing. Women who are polio survivors.
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"My earliest memory starts waking up, I can remember my mother's face and I was crying my head off and the next thing I remember was being in the hospital and my parents looking at me through a glass window and I was in isolation, and my body was packed in ice because I had a temperature of 105 degrees,” Lora Duguay told the I-Team.
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Duguay was three years old. She contracted polio and was paralyzed.
"I was able to walk again, with just a limp,” she said.
But decades later, in her 30s, Duguay said she started noticing she couldn’t walk as far as she used to be able to. She was evaluated for post-polio syndrome.
I started noticing I couldn't walk as far as I used to be able to walk."
"I didn't realize it was going to progress to the point that she wasn't going to be able to walk at all again,” Duguay said.
She said today, her world is more limited.
"The art for me has been a lifesaver. Emotionally, physically,” Duguay said.
The painter, based in Clearwater, brings color into her life through art.
“It makes me feel like I have such an accomplishment to paint these pieces, it brings me a lot of joy, relaxation, I just love it,” Duguay said.
Duguay said with a laugh that a lot of artists may tell people that art has an “ugly stage”.
“You'll be painting and you'll go, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here?’ And then you just keep going, you keep working it, and then the next thing you know, wow. You go, ‘I did that?’ And it's really fulfilling,” she said.
In that way, art imitates Duguay’s life.
"That's how life is. You go through these things, you experience them, they're not always fun, you get through it, you look back, and you say, ‘Wow. I made it,’” she said.
Duguay said she’s made it through challenges she would not wish upon anyone.
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Watching Florida’s push to end all childhood vaccine mandates, she said, "I am disgusted and appalled that anybody even came up with such a thought. That they're actually going to do this."
In Sarasota, Kathi Coleman said she felt angry watching Wednesday’s announcement.
“Because if they had the polio vaccine when I came down with polio, my life probably would be different,” she said. “I spent my first birthday in the hospital.”
At 76 years old, Coleman also counts herself among a dwindling generation of polio survivors who want to give hope — and history.
"I was 9 months old in 1949 and where I lived in Michigan it was an epidemic of polio,” Coleman said, which was prior to the vaccine being released in 1955. “So I, along with other children in my city, were the ones that came down with polio.”
Coleman, a retired teacher who gets up every morning and swims for an hour to start her day, and is a big Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan, says polio “… doesn’t define who I am, it’s just part of my life.”
Coleman told the I-Team she shares her story not for sympathy, but for perspective.
"I hope people don't, you know, feel sorry for me. Because even though I do have polio, I hope that they also — they do their research, think about their children, and hopefully they won't have to go through what my parents went through when I was small. Because I was in the hospital, I think, for over a year,” Coleman said. “They put you in isolation and my mom had no contact with me, she couldn't touch me, she couldn't hold me."
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Duguay warns this generation of parents, from her own experience, not to paint a picture of a future without vaccines.
“They have not seen what these diseases can do to people. They have not experienced it,” Duguay said.
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Kylie McGivern works tirelessly to get results for the people of Tampa Bay. Her reporting has exposed flaws in Florida’s corrections system and unemployment process. Reach out to Kylie and our I-Team if you need help holding state leaders accountable.
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