The Last of the Iron Lungs

By Jennings Brown for Gizmodo

(A Synopsis)

“Martha Lillard inside her iron lung, which has been modified by mechanics over the years.” Photo: Jennings Brown for Gizmodo

“Martha Lillard spends half of every day with her body encapsulated in a half-century old machine that forces her to breathe. Only her head sticks out of the end of the antique iron lung. On the other side, a motorized lever pulls the leather bellows, creating negative pressure that induces her lungs to suck in air.”

“ ‘The period of time that it took the nurse to get out of the chair, it seemed like forever because you weren’t breathing,’ ” Lillard said. ‘You just laid there and you could feel your heart beating and it was just terrifying. The only noise that you can make when you can’t breathe is clicking your tongue. And that whole dark room just sounded like a big room full of chickens just cluck-cluck-clucking. All the nurses were saying, ‘Just a second, you’ll be breathing in just a second.’ ”

“I wanted to be a ballerina. That was my big wish. I started walking on my toes when I was one, and I just constantly was after ballerina dolls.” “She was infected with polio at her 5th birthday party.” “I think now of my life as a ballet. I have to balance so many things. It’s a phenomenal amount of energy I have to use to coordinate everything in my life.” Martha Lillard 2017

“Mona Randolph spends six nights a week in her iron lung.” Photo: Jennings Brown for Gizmodo

“Mona got polio at the age of 20 in 1956. At the time, she was a skilled pianist planning her wedding. She needed an iron lung for the first year, until she went to rehab in Warm Spring, Georgia, where she was able to wean herself off. But 20 years later, in 1977, she had a series of bronchial infections - possibly due to post-polio syndrome - and her doctors told her she needed to start using an iron lung again.”

“The ‘yellow submarine’ is my necessary, trusted, mechanical friend,” she told me. “I approach it with relief in store at night and thankfully leave it with relief in the morning.” “They lift Mona into the iron lung using a mechanical arm attached to their ceiling.”

“Paul Alexander spends almost every moment of the day inside his iron lung.” Photo: Jennings Brown for Gizmodo

Paul Alexander “ . . spends nearly every moment in his iron lung in the center of his living room, which is decorated with degrees, awards, pictures of family, and a drawing of the Scottish folk singer Donovan, who had polio. When people enter the front door a few feet away from him, he usually greets them with a warm upside-down smile, reflected in the mirror above his head.”

“Alexander, who got polio in 1952 when he was 6, is almost entirely paralyzed below the neck but that hasn’t stopped him from going to law school and becoming a trial lawyer. ‘When I transferred to University of Texas, they were horrified to think that I was going to bring my iron lung down, but I did, and I put it in the dorm, and I lived in the dorm with my iron lung.’ ‘I had a thousand friends before it was over with, who all wanted to find out what’s that guy downstairs with a head sticking out of a machine doing here?’ ”

It is now “nearly impossible for him to get out of the iron lung for a few hours like he used to do when he went to court and represented clients in a wheel chair.”

Vaccine Advocates:

Something “they all had in common is a desire for the next generations to know about them so we’ll realize how fortunate we are to have vaccines. ‘When children inquire what happened to me, I tell them the nerve wires that tell my muscles what to do were damaged by a virus,’ Mona said. ‘And ask them if they have had their vaccine to prevent this. No one has ever argued with me.’”

“Now, my worst thought is that polio’s come back,” Paul Alexander said. “If there’s so many people who’ve not been- children, especially - have not been vaccinated . . . I don’t even want to think about it.”

Martha Lillard “is heartbroken when she meets anti-vaccine activists. ‘Of course, I’m concerned about any place where there’s no vaccine,’ she said. ‘I would just do anything to prevent somebody from having to go through what I have. I mean, my mother, if she had the vaccine available, I would have had it in a heartbeat.’ “

Read the Complete Article (that contains numerous photos and two videos): The Last of the Iron Lungs

Published November, 2017