CNN
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Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola has vivid memories of his experience surviving polio.

In an interview with Deadline about his new film “Megalopolis,” Coppola, who was diagnosed with polio as a child around the age of nine, recalled the disease’s rapid onset.

“People don’t understand that polio is a fever that only affects you for one night,” Coppola told the publication.

“You’re only sick for one night. “The terrible effects of polio, such as the inability to breathe, requiring an iron lung, or the inability to walk or be completely paralyzed, are the result of the damage caused by that one night of infection.” he said. “I remember that night. I had a fever and they took me to a hospital ward. It was so full of children that there were stretchers stacked three or four high in the hallways because there were so many more children than there were beds in the hospital.”

Polio primarily affects children under the age of 5 and can cause irreversible paralysis and even death. It is highly contagious and there is no cure; According to the WHO, this can only be prevented through vaccinations. The development and widespread distribution of a vaccine in 1955 meant the disease was largely eradicated over time. But recent vaccine skepticism has raised concerns that polio outbreaks could become more common if people choose not to get vaccinated.

Coppola, now 85, painted a bleak picture of his time in a polio ward.

“I remember the children in the iron lung, whose faces you could see in the mirror, all crying for their parents. They didn’t understand why they were suddenly in these steel cabinets,” he said. “I remember being more afraid for those kids than for myself because I wasn’t in one of those things.”

Iron lungs, as they were called, are ventilators that help polio patients breathe.

Coppola struggled with the illness, he said.

“I looked around and then when I tried to get out of bed I fell on the floor and realized I couldn’t walk,” he said. “I couldn’t get up. And I stayed in that ward for about ten days before my parents were finally able to take me home.”

The famed director credits his father, composer Carmine Coppola, with saving him while the elder Coppola sought various treatments to help his son.

He also praised the vaccine developers.

“Both doctors who developed the Salk vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, donated the patents of their vaccines to the public, unlike what is happening today where the companies own them,” Coppola said. “To see (polio) disappearing, there are so many stories about the vaccine, how many lives it saved in an epidemic that just kept expanding…It makes the idea so absurd that now they’re talking about a U-turn on would think about the vaccines.” .”