For these fighters, polio won't go away.

Byline: Jonathon King

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ She would tumble in public, fall onto a Brooklyn sidewalk in a clatter of stainless steel braces and wooden crutches, and onlookers would gasp and rush to her. But her mother's arms would go "out like an eagle," keeping them back: "No. She's all right. She can get up."

And the girl would smile from her spot on the ground and strain and balance her ruined 3-year-old legs and indeed, get up.

"The roots of a type-A personality," says 49-year-old Maureen Henrickson, listening to her mother's story as she works through her Boca Raton kitchen, fixing coffee, cutting cake, swinging her aluminum crutches in a now-familiar dance.

"There are thousands of polio survivors who got through by smiling and not giving up," she says. "So many of us overdid and overcame by trying to be like everyone else, trying to fit in. Now we're paying for our overdoing and overcoming."

Polio has come back from the grave.

An incurable disease that frightened a generation of Americans from the 1920s to the 1950s has rebounded in an ironic and cruel way. Post-polio syndrome, a flashback of muscle weakness, pain and fatigue, has settled on an estimated 120,000 to 240,000 polio survivors, many who relocated or retired to Florida. These are the folks who made it through, climbed out of iron lungs, strapped on heavy braces and overcame stunted or twisted limbs. Now PPS is weakening them decades after they were first knocked down by the disease.

"The difficult part of facing Post-Polio Syndrome is that we worked our way all the way here and now we get hit a second time," says Henrickson. "It's a slap in the face."

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As a 2-year-old, Henrickson was caught near the end of polio's run through America. It was Nov. 11, 1953, a date her mother, Virginia Naman, still calls "the day of infamy."

"She was tripping over her pajama feet, you know, the ones with the sewn-in feet. I thought they were maybe too long. I pulled them up, but she was still tripping," Naman says. "Then I went to put a ribbon in her hair, like I always did, and she winced. It hurt her and then I knew."

The headaches, a fever, the tripping. They were symptoms too many mothers had whispered in city parks, over the backyard fences of small towns, and at rural crossroads across the country.

"I took her to the pediatrician. I was holding her because she couldn't stand and when he said to me, `She has polio,' I wouldn't let her go," Naman says.

The…