7 Wheelchairs reviewed by NYT

Image description: Color photo of Gary Presley's book cover for "7 Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio." A close-up photo of one back wheel of a manual wheelchair.

Gary Presley's new book, 7 Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio, receives a rave review from the New York Times:

Those who prefer their miracles in subtler and more secular form might turn instead to Gary Presley’s extraordinary memoir of a life after polio. No one rises from a wheelchair and walks again in this book, yet the miracles clearly abound.

Mr. Presley was part of the last generation of polio patients in the United States: he became sick in 1959, right after receiving a booster shot of the old Salk vaccine. Whether the illness was from the vaccine or despite it was never clear, and in the end made little difference: within a week both legs were paralyzed, both arms drastically weakened, and he could not breathe.

The primitive respirators of the time saved his life. For months, an iron lung encased him like an oversize Tin Woodsman’s costume, doing the work his own muscles could not do. He was flat on his back, his world limited to what he could see in a small mirror affixed to the top of the machine. (With the mirror tilted correctly, he could watch “noitartnecnoC” and “drowssaP” on television.)

Eventually he graduated to a smaller, more portable lung — a metal carapace that let him sit upright. At night a rocking bed turned him violently on his head and back again to force air in and out of his lungs. Then the hospital sent him home to a small isolated Missouri dairy farm. He was 18 years old.

Mr. Presley writes with candor and precision about every facet of the next five decades. He learned to breathe without machinery, but he never walked again. A voracious reader, he skipped college and settled into a clerical job in a local insurance office. His wheelchairs became faster and sleeker, but his parents helped him dress and bathe until they died. As for toileting: Mr. Presley’s chapter devoted to the mechanics of urination and defecation in the face of paralysis is a tour de force that should be required reading for all.

Who could predict that, finally living on his own in his late 40s, he would fall in love with one of his hired aides? Or that, now approaching 70, his anger and depression faced and pretty much conquered, he would be happily married, healthy, vigorous, productive, in his words, a lucky man? A miracle, indeed.

Congrats, Gary!