Francis Ford Coppola shares harrowing story of being a polio survivor

By Lisa Respers France, CNN

(CNN) — Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola has vivid memories of his experience surviving polio.

In interview with Deadline regarding his new film “Megalopolis,” Coppola, who was diagnosed with polio as a child around the age of 9, recalled the quick onset of the disease.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that just hits you for one night,” Coppola told the publication.

“You only are sick for one night. The terrible effects of polio, like being unable to breathe so you have to be in an iron lung, or not being able to walk or be totally paralyzed, is the result of the damage of that one night of the infection,” he said. “I remember that night. I was feverish and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so crammed with kids that there were gurneys piled up three and four high in the hallways because there were so many more kids than there were beds in the hospital.”

Polio mostly affects children under 5 years old and can cause irreversible paralysis and even death. It is highly infectious and there is no cure; it can only be prevented by immunization, according to the WHO. Development and wide-scale distribution of a vaccine in 1955 largely eradicated the disease over time. Recent vaccine skepticism, however, has sparked concerns polio outbreaks could return more frequently if people choose not to get vaccinated.

Coppola, now 85, painted a bleak picture of his time in a polio ward.

“I remember the kids in the iron lungs who you could see their faces on mirrors, and they were all crying for their parents. They didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets,” he said. “I remember being more frightened for those kids, and not myself, because I was not in one of those things.”

Iron lungs, as they were known, are respirators that assisted polio patients with breathing.

Coppola struggled with the disease, he said.

“I was looking around, and then when I tried to get out of bed, I fell on the floor and I realized I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t get up. And I stayed in that ward for about 10 days before, finally, my parents were able to take me home.”

The famed director credits his father, composer Carmine Coppola, with saving him as the elder Coppola sought out various treatments in order to help his son.

He also hailed the developers of the vaccine.

“Both those doctors who developed the Salk vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, they donated the patents of their vaccines to the public as opposed to what happens today where the companies own them,” Coppola said. “To see [polio] go away, there’s so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that was only becoming a bigger epidemic…It makes it so absurd, the idea that they would consider reversing course on vaccines now.”

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