Francis Ford Coppola was warned that he might never walk again after he contracted polio as a child. The 85-year-old director recalled feeling ‘frightened’ for the other kids on the hospital ward, only to realise his own situation was worse than he initially thought.
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There was no clear course of treatment for the Megalopolis director and he was warned he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life – but his father pushed for Francis to do physical therapy, at a time when immobile therapy was widely used. ‘The idea was that if you were immobile, you wouldn’t further damage muscles,’ Francis told Deadline, recalling his experience.
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‘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,’ he said:. Francis remembered seeing the kids in ‘iron lungs’ who were all crying for their parents, and explained: ‘I remember being more frightened for those kids, and not myself, because I was not in one of those things.’.
He added: ‘I was looking around, and then when I tried to get out of bed, I fell on the floor and I realised I couldn’t walk. 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.’.