The follow is an excerpt from article published in the Omaha World-Herald on May 8, 2021. Above are articles published in Aug-Sept 1952 in the Alliance Times-Herald/Hastings Daily and Columbus Telegram. The ‘miracle child’ is Connie Finney, the mother of my wife and the grandmother of my daughter.
Worse than COVID? 1950s polio epidemic struck terror in Nebraska until quelled by vaccines
The epidemic built to a crescendo in 1952, a year children and medical professionals remember with horror.“ Polio came in like the whirlwind of a tornado,” Oberst said. He worked at Children’s Hospital, which he said treated 360 polio patients that year. The 14 iron lungs — large machines that immobilized the patients, and pressed on their bodies to keep them breathing — were constantly filled.
For Oberst, the polio patients passed by that summer in a busy blur. But over all these years, the one he remembers the best is Connie Cronin Finney, a 10-year-old from Columbus he calls his “miracle child.” She was the oldest of three daughters. In late August 1952, her younger sister, Kathy, just 3 ½, contracted polio and died within days at a hospital in Grand Island. Connie’s parents had not even buried Kathy yet when Connie fell ill. Instead of seeking treatment in Grand Island, where one daughter had just died, they got her admitted to Children’s Hospital in Omaha just before Labor Day weekend. Dr. Oberst was her supervising physician.
“My temperature was between 105 and 108. I was having almost continual convulsions and was surrounded by cold body packs,” Finney, who now lives in Omaha, said in an email. Oberst described Connie’s case in his 2013 memoir, “Miracles and Other Unusual Medical Experiences,” noting that he had tried all the standard treatments at the time, but nothing worked. He said few people could survive with a temperature elevated so high for so long. On Labor Day Sunday, her parents asked what they could do. Their doctor urged them to pray.
“I’ve done everything in my quiver,” Oberst, in an interview, recalled telling them. “I said, ‘Why don’t you storm Heaven?’” Two days later, Oberst returned to the hospital, expecting the worst. But over the holiday, Connie’s fever had broken and the convulsions stopped. “I had my first real, true miracle at that time,” Oberst said. “It had to be the prayers — no question in my mind.”
Connie had turned a corner, but her battle wasn’t yet over. She was hospitalized for another seven weeks, part of it in an iron lung — the ominous specter that hung over children of the polio generation. Connie was placed in a room with four or five other children in iron lungs. It was a helpless feeling, needing nurses to take care of every need. “They bathed us, fed us, talked to us, and tried to keep us entertained,” said Finney. “We saw the other children and the nurses through mirrors above our iron lungs. I often had a book affixed to the mirror, and I would wait for a nurse to come along and turn the page for me.” She took physical therapy during short periods out of the iron lung and slowly regained strength. Amazingly, she had no paralysis. “For awhile they had not known whether I would walk again or not,” Finney said. “But one evening I walked to (my parents) when the elevator doors opened.”
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