My Cousin’s Body Decomposed in a Field — Just Like She Wanted
Remembering the inspiring life of Zella Arnold
I’d like to tell you about a very special cousin.
Zella Arnold was born in rural Scott County, Virginia in 1926. After suffering a fall in 1939 that cost her the use of her legs, she was misdiagnosed with polio and would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
She was bedfast from September 1939 until February 1940, when she was sent for treatment in Richmond, Virginia.
There, her atrophied legs were stretched by a contraption in her bed that nurses would slowly crank, which she said was quite painful.
As a teenager in the 1940s, she received medical care at Warm Springs, Georgia — where President Franklin D. Roosevelt was receiving hydrotherapy for polio.
She had even been scheduled to meet the President in the days just before his death there on April 12, 1945.
