Lorene Devine wasn’t afraid of catching polio back in 1948, and decades later, she’s not afraid of catching the coronavirus.
Ms. Devine, now 93 and living in Genesis Village, graduated from nursing school in 1948, just before the peak of the polio epidemic in the United States during the early 1950s. She treated polio patients while working at a hospital Wausau, Wis., and while there are differences between that epidemic and the current pandemic, there are similarities, too, she said.
“It’s kind of déjà vu for me,” she said.
Right after graduation, Ms. Devine took a job as a camp nurse in Wisconsin, and that was about the same time as the polio outbreak in Milwaukee and Chicago.
Many of the campers’ families had cottages near the campground. But for the duration of camping season that summer, Ms. Devine and everyone else found themselves directed to stay on the campground.
“Because of the spread of polio, we got quarantined,” she said. “Nobody in, nobody out.”
After that, she went to work in Wausau in a communicable disease hospital, treating polio patients.
In those days, personal protective equipment — masks, gowns, gloves, etc. — largely appeared the same, though the gowns were made of cloth and the modern N95 mask hadn’t yet been invented.
And rather than intubation, polio patients were treated with iron lungs, machines which stimulated breathing.
“Medicine was a little less complicated than it is now,” Ms. Devine said. “And also polio was not nearly as contagious as this virus. You didn’t see people wearing masks. There was no social distancing.”
Plus the polio epidemic covered a lot longer period of time, she said, lasting decades until a vaccine was invented. Throughout its spread, though, she said there were larger outbreaks in certain areas, and some places were hit harder than others, similar to the coronavirus’ trajectory today.
“It’s kind of like we’re seeing now,” she said. “Some of the rural areas are getting hit just as it’s tapering off in the cities.”
Ms. Devine moved to Toledo in 1953 when she got married. Her husband, Andy Devine, was the first judge of Lucas County Juvenile Court. He died in 2018.
In Chicago, their daughter, Laurie Jacob, 59, has been working as a nurse since 1982. It has been enlightening, Ms. Jacob said, to compare her experience with her mother’s and noted that while a lot has changed in medicine, a lot has also stayed the same.
Because of the shortages of PPE, Ms. Jacob said some health facilities are going back to using cloth gowns. Shortages of medical equipment also means some medical staff have found themselves temporarily reverting back to older methods.
After running short of infusion pumps, Ms. Jacob, for example, used a roller clamp to measure out IV medication, which was a normal method back in the ‘80s, she said, and it’s the same method her mother used back in the ‘40s.
Ms. Jacob, too, started her career during a viral epidemic.
“When I first started, it was AIDS,” Ms. Jacob said.
Epidemics and pandemics have occurred throughout history, she said, and many of those diseases either have vaccines or effective treatments now. She is optimistic that the same will happen with coronavirus.
“We conquered it. We figured it out. We’ll do it again,” she said.
Ms. Devine said she never once thought about the possibility of catching polio, during the height of the epidemic. As a nurse, she — and, she said, many of her colleagues — felt invincible and compared it to the men she knew who had signed up to fight in World War II.
“It’s going to change us,” she said about the virus. “World War II changed us. This will change us, too. And we won’t forget it.”
First Published May 4, 2020, 12:00 p.m.
