The two stories are in conflict. One gives the woman hero status. The other says she’s anything but special.
You be the judge.
WHEN SHE was 10 months old, Connie Buller contracted polio.
She remembers once taking “a few steps,” unaided, but for most of her life has been confined to a wheelchair. She’s earned her way through college and an advanced degree. At 64, Buller is enjoying retirement after teaching for 35 years in area public schools.
Her sense of humor is easy to prick, although she bristles at the idea she deserves to be called a hero because of how she has survived her affliction.
“To be a hero you have to have made a choice,” she said. “I’m just an average person, with faults and good points. I’m extremely stubborn. If you’re handicapped, they call that a nice name — tenacious.”
Buller’s cousin, DeAnn Sullivan, has nominated Buller as a “hero,” in an effort to win her a new mobilized van offered by the National Mobility Equipment Dealers Association. The “Local Hero,” campaign lasts through the end of May and offers a chance of winning one of three fully customized wheelchair accessible vans.
Buller currently drives a 22-year-old van that, to be honest, has seen better days.
And though Buller appreciates the effort, she’s a little nonplussed about the accolades.
“I’ve tried to never be intimidated by having polio,” she said. “In fact, I’ve always been a little bit ‘snotty’ about it in the respect that if you don’t think I can do something, I’ll show you I can.”
THAT GUMPTION comes from a life of trials.
As an infant in 1948, Buller’s first diagnosis was that she had a “sister” disease of polio and that by age 2 would “grow out of it.”
This is back in the days before Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine for polio, a crippling and potentially fatal infectious disease that affects the spinal cord. For those born before 1955, parents lived in fear of their children contracting the disease that radomly selected its victims. In 1952, an epidemic of polio killed 3,000 children.
When she was a toddler, Buller was sent to Shriner’s Hospital in St. Louis, Mo., where for the next two years she underwent various surgeries to try to fix Buller’s increasingly debilitated legs. “One year they did surgery on an Achilles tendon. The next, they broke both my legs at the tibia to try to get them to straighten out.”
During that period it was a custom of the hospital to allow parents to visit their hospitalized children on Sundays only, for one-and-a-half hours.
“My parents were poor, so they made the journey only once a month,” Buller said.
When it was finally time for Buller to come home, “I didn’t want to leave the hospital — my home. And I cried and cried, which upset my mother to no end.”
