Note: The following paragraphs are excerpted from the book “The Hardest Life I Could Ever Love”, a chronicle of Mary Blahnik’s life edited by Fred Blahnik
…..A week before Thanksgiving, I received a telephone call from Sister Kenny Institute with the thrilling news that Dad could return home. I cried crocodile tears of unadulterated joy after receiving that personally historic message.
Mrs. Race Crane drove me to Minneapolis the following day. When I first looked at Dad, I was shocked and felt my earlier exuberance hastily evaporate; this man did not appear to be in any physical shape for returning to normal family living!!!
But since space was at an alarming premium at Sister Kenny Institute that autumn, every patient was being discharged as early as possible to make room for the many others languishing on the institution’s long polio waiting list. So despite my skepticism and grave misgivings, Dad rode home with Mrs. Crane and me that gloomy November day.
Dad’s happiness to return home was heartbreakingly evident as soon as Mrs. Crane turned into our long rural driveway; he gave each of our children passionate bearhugs the minute he stepped out of the Crane car, nearly squeezing leviathan smiles from their faces in the process. But in his weakened, de-conditioned state it was difficult for my husband to move around freely, and in fact he never left our house until late March of 1951. Before leaving Minneapolis, I had been studiously instructed by Sister Kenny staff on the rigorous physical therapy Dad would need to perform each and every day at home in order to optimize his health.
Just a week later—on Thanksgiving Day, 1950—“Old Man Winter” blew into southeastern Minnesota with pure vengeance. As the day slowly progressed, weather conditions which originally started out as benignly snowy rapidly deteriorated into a genuine howling blizzard, and my attention became wholly focused outdoors on some requisite, last-minute winter preparations that needed to be accomplished. I believe we had fried chicken for our Thanksgiving feast that year, as I had succeeded in nabbing and subsequently chopping the head off one unlucky fowl. But all I can really recollect anymore about that memorable day is the unbelievable help I received from our older children—especially precocious little Mary Agnes as she slaved away in the kitchen not unlike a crazed lunatic.
| Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible. —Edward Teller |
Dad was finally safely home with his family, it was Thanksgiving Day, our children were thrilled to have their patriarch back with them, and we….we…..we were all just extraordinarily thankful fortune had thought to smile on our penniless family for this grand occasion. After witnessing firsthand the depressing permanence of those carefully-ordered rows of “Iron Lungs” up at Kenny Institute with desperate people imprisoned inside them for a near eternity, things could have easily turned out infinitely worse for the dear, gentle man we called husband and father.
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