Living With Disability - My Mother's Sister
All my life I have known how it is to have a family member with special needs. My aunt (my mom's younger sister) was born normal but when she was three years old she had measles together with the rest of her siblings. She was the first to "recover" only to develop seizures about 3 days later. This was in 1940 and there was no measles vaccine then, nor was measles a well understood disease. She was brought to the best doctors but at that time the complications from measles were not yet completely known so they thought she developed poliomyelitis and treated her as such. My grandparents placed her on therapy to treat her flaccid paralysis but, she did not improve. Her condition was aggravated by the onset of WWII when accessibility to health services was not readily available. From then on, my aunt needed full-time caregiving in order to feed, bathe and clothed. Although she can walk wobbly, she cannot use her hands and eventually learned to feed herself with her