A lifetime of ill health is something you learn to live with and move on. And it helps if you have the support and friendships of Alcoholics Anonymous to back you up.

Case in point: Colleen L., now 39 years sober and going strong despite severe childhood polio and a lifetime of chronic, near-disabling pain. She´s won a battle with breast cancer and with shingles, but she now has post-polio syndrome which is decreasing her range of mobility. She participates in a self-help group for chronic pain at her retirement home, and is compelled to take time release morphine to make the pain bearable. The group, an affiliate of the American Chronic Pain Association, meets every month at her apartment.

Through it all, Colleen has blossomed into a writer of some note since she retired from teaching elementary school. An active participant in classes at the Lifetime Learning Center at Sand Point, she writes skits for the classes there and enlists her fellow seniors as cast members. She has published both her plays and stories. More recently, she´s been writing poetry too. Here´s an example:

Colleen was born in Seattle, the only child of a Depression-era family. When she was 11 years old, in the poliomyelitis epidemic of 1943, she was stricken with a severe case that affected her entire body except her lungs. "Polio changed my life permanently," she said the other day. "The only reason I´m walking today is that I was given the Sister Kenny treatment."

It is a remarkable fact that Colleen received the revolutionary treatment developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny of Australia at Children´s Hospital here. Sister Kenny´s treatment, the exact opposite of established practice, used hot packs and gentle exercise to offset the crippling effects of the disease. Conventional treatment called for braces and cold baths, and produced three generations of permanently crippled survivors, including Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"I just wrote a big story about my illness," she said. "For the first 24 hours, I couldn´t talk. I spent two months in the hospital and was in isolation the first week. It was pretty upsetting, and then there was a mixup and my parents didn´t visit me one Sunday, the only day visitors were allowed. I remember singing ´My Country ´Tis of Thee´ to try to build my courage."

As soon as she could walk, she went home to her grandmother´s house and an unending regimen of hot packs all over her body, and gentle movement. Her mother was her faithful nurse throughout that fall. Colleen never had braces, and by January 1944 was able to go back to school. During the noon hour, she rested in the mother superior´s office.

She got a degree in English at Seattle University, but found there was no economic future for English majors, so she went to business school. That didn´t work either. She was drinking heavily by that time-she thinks she was an alcoholic by the time she was 21-and had residual tremors due to polio that prevented her from passing Boeing´s typing test.

"That turned out to be a blessing," she said. "I went back to school, got a teaching certificate and taught for 30 years" before retirement in 1992. Panic attacks began early on, though, and she medicated with alcohol. That wasn´t enough, so she started a diet of tranquilizers. Did she become addicted? "Wow!" was her reply. At one point, she was taking 18 tranks a day, obtained with legal prescriptions prescribed by a psychiatrist.

When she was 25, a friend took her to her first A.A. meeting. "I slipped so many times after that, I can´t tell you. And each time, it got worse. Twice, I ended up at Shadel´s [now Schick Shadel Hospital] and was in Providence a couple of times. I had the DTs, and my weight fell to 79 pounds. When I got pneumonia, I just told everybody that I wanted to die, and I nearly did. "The place where I spent the most time was a sanitarium for mental patients. There were no treatment centers then. The last time I was there I stayed seven months getting off booze and tranquilizers. "It was a bad time all around. I was afraid every single day of my life and the tranquilizers didn´t help, so I have no idea why I went back to them. Finally, the school put me on a leave of absence. They didn´t know what was wrong with me. I ended up living with my mother in her one-bedroom apartment, sleeping on her couch and earning cigarette money by keeping her place clean and cooking her dinners.

"Shadel´s was the last place I was in. It just happened there was a school next door, and it made me wonder if I could ever teach again, stay sober and lead a normal life. Somehow, seeing that school gave me hope, and through God´s grace, it was never really bad after that. A week or so later, I went back to A.A., for the first time wanting what they had." That was Nov. 3, 1964, her sobriety date. But she was still struggling to get off the tranquilizers, strengthened by her third connection with A.A. "I stopped taking them the following February. One day, after recovering from the terrors of withdrawal, I woke one morning unafraid and remained that way all day. For the first time in 10 years, I went the whole day without being afraid. I was on the brink of a brand new life. " And she soon had another triumph-she learned to drive.

Colleen offered her own assessment of life as a sober alcoholic in these words:

"A.A. has been in my life ever since I was a teenager and my newly sober father handed me a paper with the 12 Steps written on it. I followed him into the program when I was in my 20s, but unlike my father, it took me seven years to make one year of sobriety.

"How do I practice the A.A. program now? Each morning, I ask God to help me to do his will and keep me sober for that day. Spending a short time reading books that have daily spiritual readings and listening to spiritual audio tapes are a help too. I attend one meeting a week and have a home group because I feel it is very important to find a home group and go to it on a regular basis. I also go to a monthly meeting for people who have 15 or more years sobriety called the Longtimers, which is held at 12:00 on the first Saturday of the month at St. Paul´s. This group gives those of us with longer sobriety a chance to gain strength from each other in an atmosphere where we don´t hear the bad language that can sometimes be heard at other meetings. I´m secretary of this group right now. Once or twice a year, I attend a serenity retreat for members of A.A. and Alanon. These weekend retreats are based on the 12 Steps, and give me the spiritual uplift which I sorely need all too often. Last of all, there is the Serenity Prayer which I say a lot. There have been times in my life when things were really going wrong when I said it over and over and over again. It seems to calm me down and lift me up.

"What does A.A. mean to me? It is my life, my home-the place where I found not only sobriety but the ability to love, to be grateful, the courage to change, lifelong friends and a loving God to depend upon. Through good times and bad, A.A. has been there to give me the strength I needed even when I felt very weak. All the good things in my life are there because I´m a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous."

Colleen has written her own obituary for future reference. Here is an extract:

"…As a member of A.A., I can gratefully say that my life has been a success, that out of the mire of failure, shame, fear, and self hatred, I was lifted up and placed with people who taught me to love, and where I learned that God loves me just as I am no matter what was in my past or how many mistakes I´ve made ever since…"

Finally, her favorite words from the Big Book:

"WE ARE NOT SAINTS."

Interviewed by Dick S. Written by Dick and Colleen L.