Then, in her mid-40s, the Blackwood resident began to lose her balance. She had trouble lifting things. Her muscles began to ache.
``I fell on my two knees on Walnut Street on my way to work,'' she said. She thought it might be a sign of menopause. So did her family doctor. Then a nerve specialist in Philadelphia told her she was suffering from post-polio syndrome.
``I went, `Polio?' It came from the back of my brain. I said, `That?!' ''
Today, at 54, Nasuti coordinates a South Jersey support group for others who, like her, thought polio had been relegated to the pages of medical history books. She joined several hundred polio survivors yesterday for the annual conference of the New Jersey Polio Network at the Ocean Place Hilton in Long Branch.
They moved around the hotel lobby on scooters, in wheelchairs, with leg braces - contraptions most of them had put away more than four decades ago, if they had needed them at all. The crowd of 40- to 90-year-olds came to recruit members for local support groups, to hear about the latest drugs and therapies, and to learn how others - in varying stages of disability - are coping with the ghost of a dead disease.
* Though polio is still active in other parts of the world, most people believed it had met its match in America with the Salk vaccine of 1954.
The vaccine, and a later version in sugar cubes, was doled out to schoolchildren. It rendered the virus - which attacks muscle nerves - impotent. But not before the disease had killed thousands of people and left many others fully or partially paralyzed.
Thousands of survivors - most notably President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - managed to overcome the effects of polio, working through the paralysis with aggressive exercise and physical therapy.
In the last decade, however, many started to notice problems again: muscle weakness. Fatigue. Pain. Trouble breathing and swallowing.
