Margaret Saunders was 16 when she took ill.
It was January 1951.
"I took my niece to Newcastle beach for a little visit to play in the sand. She was only two. I took her back home on the bus to Birmingham Gardens," she said.
"I came home on the bus to Waratah, had tea and got ready for a 21st birthday party I was going to in town.
"I got there about 7.30pm. By about 8.30pm, I began to feel sick with a headache."
Over the next few days, she felt no better. Her mother called the doctor.
"He said it was polio," she said.
She was taken to an infectious diseases hospital at Waratah, where it was initially thought she may have been misdiagnosed.
She vividly recalled doctors asking her questions and talking among themselves.
"Naturally I thought, 'Oh whatever has happened to me? What's wrong with me?'."
"One question they did ask was whether one leg or arm was any different to the other."
That night, she told the nurse she felt a "little tingle in the inner part of my upper right leg".
"At 4am the next morning, they found I was completely paralysed. Then they knew I did have polio."
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She was taken to a ward with other polio patients.
"I had to stay there with no visitors for three weeks.
"I couldn't move. They had to do everything for me."
She recalled the women's auxiliary sewing material around a house brick.
"They put that house brick at the bottom of my feet, so my feet would stay upright. If they fell, when the paralysis went I would have had drop foot," she said.
At the end of the three weeks, there was a "very slight change" in her condition.
She was transferred to another building for hydrotherapy.
"Each morning, they'd take us out of bed and put us in a swimming costume and a wheelchair, then wheel us to a big room with two huge waist-high baths in it.
"There'd be four in the bath at the one time."
A physiotherapist went through rehabilitation exercises, moving her arms and legs. In the afternoon, she'd be placed on a table where nurses would put her through the same exercises.
"Then they'd put me on an exercise bike. They'd hold me and put my feet on the pedals," she said, adding that the pedals were flawed because they had no foot-straps.
Over time, she learned to walk again.
"I was there for five months altogether," she said.
She got better but the muscles in the "whole of my right leg were as dead as a doorknob".
"I can walk, but all these years I've had to make sure not to bend my right knee when I'm walking. If I bend it, I'm on the ground."
She went to the equivalent of TAFE two days a week to learn dressmaking and millinery. She'd help her mother, who was unwell and died in July 1952.
"I was able to get some work in a little shop around the corner from us. I'd work three to four hours a day," she said.
She was well for decades, then suffered a relapse.
"In 1998, I woke up one morning at 5am. There was something wrong with my legs. I thought, 'Oh no, I've had a stroke'."
She was suffering from a condition called post-polio syndrome, which involves a gradual weakening of muscles previously affected by polio.
She returned to the same building in the Waratah hospital grounds for another five months of physiotherapy to treat paralysis in her right leg and left arm.
"It was really strange because they put me in exactly the same room [as when she was 16]," she said.
Now 85, she still suffers from severe pain.
"This is the late effects of polio, gnawing away at my muscles," she said.
This is what frightens her about COVID-19.
"Nobody knows what happens with this coronavirus and whether it will affect people in years to come."
Mrs Saunders said being a Girls' Brigade leader for 32 years and dressmaking gave her a purpose, helping her cope with her experience.
