Guest Column: Looking back at a life filled with challenges

By FRED PIKER 

At age eight, I awoke one morning and realized I could neither speak nor move my arms or legs. I was rushed to the hospital. I had contracted polio. Every 12 hours for the next two weeks I was given a shot of sulfanilamide in alternate sides of my buttocks. My fever receded and I returned home. The doctors told my parents if I survived, I would be in a wheelchair, and/or braces, or an iron lung the rest of my life. 

My parents contacted Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse who treated President  Franklin D. Roosevelt. She suggested they exercise my arms and legs several times daily. Every week for the next 18 months she called to check on my progress. Eventually I was able to sit up. Sister Kenney also advised mom and dad to take Freddy to the YMCA pool and teach him how to swim. Although I have some scars from polio, water therapy restored my limbs.

During 18 months of recovery, I was homeschooled. A teacher brought each week’s lesson plan to my parents. Classmates dropped by. Also, at least once a week our pastor visited and prayed with us. When I learned how to walk again, I had a slight limp. Upon returning to school, friends called me “Limpy.” I cried a lot. Our pastor told me, “Hold on Freddy. True friends will accept you for who you are as a person and how you treat them — not because of your physical condition.” 

As compared with the outcome other children experienced, I was fortunate. The 18-month paralysis, support and recovery provided by family and others, however, prepared me to address many life challenges that still lay ahead.

My profession as an international human resources consultant required much foreign travel. Frequently I was away for several weeks at a time, which impacted my personal and family life. Weekly international phone calls and faxes helped to restore balance — one time, my wife called me in Singapore and asked me to explain how to start the lawn mower. What sustained us was our mutual commitment to family, faith and community service. 

While working in Saudi Arabia at the outset of the Iranian revolution, an Iranian government director general contacted me and asked me to return immediately to Iran to complete a major consulting project. I booked a flight to Tehran, cleared customs at the airport and checked into the Park Hotel. Since neither my home office nor my family knew I was in Iran, I had to advise them. Because I could not call from the hotel, I went by taxi to a telephone building elsewhere in Tehran. The streets were deserted and many stores were boarded up. As the taxi entered a massive square in which the building was cited, I observed a ring of tanks circling the square with their gun barrels pointed toward the center. Immediately I had a flashback of a picture that appeared two months prior on the front page of a national newspaper showing the same square where the Iranian government gunned down 3,500 Iranian citizens. 

Through broken English and Farsi, the taxi driver told me the telephone building was at the far end of the square. I gulped and asked the driver if he would wait. He nodded yes. I crossed the square and prayed as I entered the building. Upon completing the call, I returned outside. The taxi driver was waiting. He drove by the ring of tanks to the exit gate and safely returned me to the hotel. 

A few months after my wife and I moved to Heritage Hills in Somers, she was rushed to the hospital. Her kidneys failed and had to endure a highly risky procedure to remove fluids from her body. I stood by her and held her hand for 24 hours. She remained in intensive care for two weeks and subsequently spent nearly three months in a rehab facility. For the next four-and-a-quarter years, I was her principal home caregiver. She passed in June 2021.

Soon after, I was elected to the Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Katonah and subsequently reelected senior warden for the third time. With support from family, friends and St. Luke’s parishioners, and through my participation in community activities and daily visits to a local health club, I have transitioned to a new life chapter.

A longtime resident of northern Westchester, Fred Piker recently published a memoir, “Balancing Family, Career, Faith and Community – My Life Journey.”