Run for Your Life

Thirteen years ago I was at 10 days and counting until I left my award winning career as a VA social worker to "heal my life." The day had been circled in red on my calendar for 6 weeks in advance of May 25th, 2007. It was almost go time...


I felt as though the Universe was giving me a shove out of the nest of safety of having a full time job with a very good salary into the unknown. It was both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time!

Did I have any idea that just a little less than a year later I would be featured on the cover of "Healthy Brookline" in the Brookline Tab giving an interview about my journey on the road to the 2009 Boston Marathon?



Absolutely not although I had written the poem, "Running the Race".

In early May 2008, I sat with Neal Simpson in a coffee shop in Brookline sharing my journey with him:

Fifty years after polio, a Brookline woman is fighting back
By Neal Simpson/staff writer

Brookline - Since she was a little girl, Mary McManus had rarely moved faster than a walk.

But last month, the former polio patient bought her first pair of running shoes. And now she’s training for a marathon.

Paralyzed by polio at the age of 5, the Brookline mother of two now spends every day fighting back against the crippling effects of the disease that still threatens to rob her of her strength and mobility 50 years later. She said she won’t stop until she runs her first marathon.

“I just know with every fiber in my body that we will,” she said. “It’s all happening.”

McManus faces an uphill battle. Though polio itself has been virtually eradicated from the developed world, McManus is one of more than 440,000 Americans who could see a resurgence of symptoms decades later, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Scientists believe this resurgence, called post-polio syndrome, is a result of natural aging and stress on the motor neurons that survive an initial polio attack.

Polio survivors learn to depend on these motor neurons as they recover, and can live relatively normal lives before they give out later in life, according to Mary Cole, a senior occupational therapist at the International Center for Polio in Framingham.

“There’s usually a long period of stability,” said Cole. “If not, there’s something else going on.”

Cole teaches post-polio patients how to save their energy, and recommends that many start using the braces and canes they once used as kids. It’s about improving quality of life, she said.

“A lot of people think exercise is what can get you through this, and that’s not the case,” Cole said. “Most of these patients have been overusing these muscles, and we need to find a balance.”

But McManus said she refuses to slow down. She wants to prove that other post-polio patients don’t have to, either.

“I’m here to let them know that that might be true for some people, it doesn’t have to that way,” she said.

‘Everything just gave out’

It was 1958, and McManus was a kindergartner in gym class. She remembers exactly how it happened.

“I was running around, having a great time, and I just dropped,” she remembered. “Everything just gave out.”

Polio left McManus paralyzed on her left side. She was walking again within a couple of months, but her limp would never leave her and she often tired easily.

Unable to play with her classmates, the young McManus turned to academics.

“I became a straight-A student, and I was valedictorian,” she said. “I never thought much about my body. It was an enemy — I hated it.”

All through her childhood, her college years and her career as a veterans’ social worker, McManus suffered from chronic fatigue, a burning sensation in her muscles and a slight limp. But in 1996, things started to get much worse, as McManus often felt short of breath and began having trouble swallowing.

But McManus’ doctors, unfamiliar with post-polio syndrome, blamed the symptoms on menopause, coupled with depression prompted by her twin children’s departure for college.

So McManus soldiered on for another decade as her symptoms became even worse. By the time she got help in 2006, she could barely get out of bed in the morning and had trouble climbing the stairs in her house. Tremors shook her body and her limp became more severe.

“I was beside myself,” she said. “In my private moments, I just wanted to give up.”

In her darkest hour, McManus turned to prayer and poetry to sustain her. As her collection of poems grew, she began compiling it into a book, which she has published under the title “New World Greetings.”

McManus eventually checked into Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, where she was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome after doctors ruled out all other causes. The first thing the doctors told herwas to quit her high-stress job and focus on herself.

It was exactly what she needed, McManus said.

“I needed to hear that I needed to stop everything and conserve my energy,” she said.

McManus quit her job of 18 years in May 2007, and immediately began feeling better. With the stress of life as a social worker gone, McManus felt her body began rebuilding lost muscle.

Starting that summer, doctors at Spaulding treated McManus for a pinched nerve and helped her regain her upper-body strength. She began a regimen of cardiovascular exercise and learned to conserve her energy.

“They got me to the point where I felt a little stronger,” she said. “My pain went almost to nothing.”

More importantly, McManus said, the exercises gave her a sense of control over her body and the confidence to do something about her disease.

‘Let’s see what this body can do’

When she was discharged from Spaulding in October, McManus called up a personal trainer she’d heard of named Janine Hightower.

“Basically, we said, ‘Let’s see what this body can do.’”

At the time, McManus was struggling to climb a 12-inch step in her home. When the two began their exercises, McManus set a low standard for success: All she wanted, she said, was the ability to get off her toilet without help.

Hightower began her on a gentle exercise routine, gradually advancing her from strength training to short jogs.

“When she was first learned she had post-polio syndrome, everyone was telling her to go easy on her body to rest and sit down,” Hightower said. “I sort of took the opposite approach. I told her to challenge her body.”

McManus took the message to heart. When she began reaching the goals they had set earlier this year, Hightower asked McManus what she wanted to do next.

Run a marathon, she responded.

What do you think? Add your comment to article at www.wickedlocal.com/brookline.
Neal Simpson can be reached at nsimpson@cnc.com.

While a few of the facts were incorrect; I was never an inpatient at Spaulding and I was discharged from outpatient care that began in January in May of 2007, Neal eloquently captured the essence of where I was in my journey. The Tab also assigned a photographer for the article.

People did leave comments on the article letting me know how much I inspired them with my journey.

One of the most stunning aspects of my experience is how the physiatrist and therapists at the Post Polio Clinic set themselves up as experts letting me know with great authority that I was destined for a course of rapid decline as I aged. I was blessed to meet a physical therapist at another Spaulding site who did not subscribe to the "if you use it you will lose it" philosophy and then to meet Janine who helped me to go the distance in my quest to heal my life from the once ravaging effects of paralytic polio and enduring years of abuse at the hands of family members.co

I discovered the sport of running that transformed my life and continues to be my source of joy, health and well being and therapy for my mind, body and soul.

I knew with a deep knowing that it was time to run for my life ignoring the warnings of the medical community and tuning in to the Voice within to guide me.

From my heart to yours
To your health and wellness
In love and gratitude
Mary

Be sure to visit my website to learn more about my journey from being told to prepare to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair to the finish line of the Boston Marathon and beyond.

My books are available on Amazon