Steel-willed Hettie de Gannes talks adventure-filled life after polio

“My father brought his peers from Port of Spain for their opinion, but it seemed as if I was doomed to die…,” she shared. “I didn’t think of dying. I knew that there was a Greater Person above and I willed myself to live.”

After three months, she slowly began to move, but the left side of her body was weaker. When her health improved, she went to boarding school at Bishop Anstey High School, where she met Alyson Johnson, who remains one of her closest friends.

Hettie remembers her school days with a smile, “Nobody ever made me feel different. I walked with a limp, but I was the ‘shoot’ in netball and I played cricket with a runner. We’d skate up and down the corridors.”

“When I eventually met my husband Anthony in Trinidad, he had sailed for seven years, so we were able to talk about the different places we had traveled. The three children God gave us and a happy marriage of 36 years are my greatest achievement in life,” Hettie says.

Her family encouraged her artwork and she has received many awards, including a national Hummingbird Medal for her contributions to Culture. She was invited to China on three occasions, including to create a piece for the Changchun World Sculpture Park, the largest sculpture park in the world. With her husband and sons, she established a Foundry that was the first to use the ancient ‘lost-wax method’ of bronze sculpture in the Caribbean.

Hettie has never allowed walking with difficulty to slow her down. Since the 1960s, she has arranged for and played in several different steelbands, including Silhouettes, Exodus and Invaders. Now, steelpan is the national instrument of T&T.

In 1972, thirty years after she was infected, there was another polio outbreak, with over 200 cases. “Having two babies at that time to look after was quite a tough job,” she said. Carnival was postponed too.
 

“My husband was devastated, because if he didn’t take part in Carnival he didn’t have a good rest of the year.”

Her father, a District Medical Officer, was part of the mass vaccination drive that followed, working until 10 o’ clock at night to vaccinate children in the countryside. The following year, the government introduced the Public Health Nursery Schools and Primary Schools Immunization Act, which required children to be vaccinated against a range of diseases, including polio, in order to enter school.

As Hettie points out, “We haven’t had any polio outbreaks since!”
Then came 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Hettie admits the lockdowns jarred her.
 

“I like attending to my patients [in her optometry practice of 52 years]. I missed my family gatherings and visiting friends. I stopped going to physiotherapy. I couldn’t even hug my grandchildren.”

Equally painful is knowing the potential life-changing after-effects such a disease can have.

“I would be so emotional listening to reports of COVID-19 because I do not think half of those who do not want to be vaccinated understand what it is to get a disease like that - to lie in bed completely helpless. I didn’t hesitate to get vaccinated. I can’t stress it enough: go and get your vaccination.”

Now, Hettie hopes to spend more time with her four grandchildren and her sons William, Antonio and Wilfred. Reflecting on her extraordinary life, she looks forward to the future. Polio didn’t have the final word and neither will COVID-19.

“I would like to live a little longer. I still have more that I want to do.”