Plot
In 1948, twelve-year-old Peg Kehret starts to notice some twitching in her leg during her school choir class, and then she also falls. When she gets home, her parents call a doctor. It turns out that she is diagnosed with not one, but three types of polio. She spends the next several months in a hospital fighting for her life. She moves hospitals a few times, and she has to get rid of contaminated objects along the way, like a teddy bear from Art, Peg's older brother.
She has new room-mates, including Tommy, a younger boy in an iron lung, and "the iron horse",Peg's wheelchair. She struggles to overcome paralysis and learn to walk again. She also fights to stay off of a medical ventilator /respirator, and to swallow milkshakes (while in an oxygen tent) without choking which ends up saving her life. During her stay at a different hospital, she becomes friends with several other girls with polio: Renee, Shirley, Alice, and Dorothy. She learns that Alice had been at the hospital for 10 years, because her family didn't want her. Together, they endure hardships and celebrate accomplishments as they attempt to live normal lives in the hospital while fighting polio. Later, Peg heals from polio, but unfortunately, some of her friends did not.
Read more about this topic: Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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