A True Story:  My Drive To Overcome Obstacles

There was no way I could climb that rope. 

It was part of the test for our Athletic Badge in Boy Scouts.  Climb a rope from ground to tree limb, then shimmy down.  In Springbank Park, polio would prevent my pass, and I started to cry. 

“Wernham, you are next!” the leader called.  A leader from our Troop walked up and whispered to him.  I was called out of line and told that I would pass, in spite of my failure. 

I was 11 years old.  Polio at the age of 13 months had left my left arm atrophied, weak but not useless.

It was the first time I was conflicted between claiming favors because of my “disability” or overcoming things in spite of it.

My parents had set the course all through my childhood and it was at that moment that I chose to overcome.  It was one thing to be weak-muscled, another to be weak-willed.

Even at summer camp, my Dad asked the swim instructor what stroke he could teach me while I learned to swim.  Freestyle would result in circles, instead of laps.  So I still do the Australian Crawl, and that summer I got my swimming badge. 

My mother could have made a fortune in marketing.  Long before it was on T-shirts across the nation, she would quietly say “Just Do It!, Teddy, Just Do It!”  And I would do my best. 

Through high school and university, I worked on the farm.  The only thing I could not do was to catch chickens for shipment, because one had to carry four birds in each hand.  Anybody who has shipped chickens would be envious of my disqualification!  Hay bales, shoveling, laying tile, planting, no problem.  Nobody ever said I couldn't carry my weight. 

The discomfort asking a woman out for a date was not because of shyness, it came from my fear of “discovery”.  What would they say about my left hand?  The spectre of recoil was real enough to curb the normal process, and to this day, even with my darling wife, I hesitate to reach out from the left. 

Even so, once and only once, was my reaction regrettable.  A former adult stepson pranced around the townhouse parking lot, after midnight one summer, in the heat of heightened conflict, and yelled, “Ted Wernham has a gimpy arm, a gimpy arm, a $%@*# gimpy arm!  That conflict resulted in a conviction at Court.  I regret the incident and its result.  Always will. 

Polio has added drive to my life.  The question has never been: What could I have done without the affliction?  The reality is that, for me, achievement was a method of compensating, of overcoming.  Student Council President, Chair of Boards and Commissions, City Council, public speaking, football, hockey, aerobics and step classes, father, lover -- none of these because of polio, but all of these despite polio. 

I will never have the full use of my left hand or arm, but as my fellow polio survivors have stated already, “I was one of the lucky ones!”

And I thank God every day.

Ted Wernham

as published in the London Free Press November 26, 2004