Posted on 07/10/2026 8:39:55 PM PDT by Red Badger
Martha Ann Lillard, the last U.S. polio patient who used an iron lung to survive, has died at age 78.
The Shawnee, Okla., resident first experienced symptoms of the disease on her fifth birthday in 1953, she told KFOR 8 days before her death. “I woke up and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me,” she said. “I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow.”
“After four days, I went unconscious. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move my arms or legs,” she explains. Lillard had contracted polio — just two years before a vaccine would be introduced that would help eliminate cases of the devastating disease in the U.S.
At the time, an iron lung — a full-body ventilator — was the go-to treatment for polio patients. “They usually didn’t like to put children in because [children] fought it, but I didn’t,” Lillard said. “I liked it. It felt good to breathe.”
Polio, which is caused by the extremely contagious poliovirus, is “a crippling and potentially deadly disease that affects the nervous system,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It lives in the feces of an infected person, but can also be spread via eating or drinking food that’s been contaminated. Although most people who contract polio do not exhibit symptoms — or if they do, they experience flu-like fevers, tiredness, nausea, headache, nasal congestion, and sore throat — the CDC says 1 in 200 to 1 in 2,000 people will develop paralysis. It was famously the case with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who needed a wheelchair after he contracted the disease.
(Excerpt) Read more at people.com ...
Just watched a Video that expanded Jesus’s
Statement to His Disciples;”You Shall
do Greater Miracles than These!”
It Went on to Suggest the Medical Arts could be descendant from That Promise.
.
Born in 1955 so I timed Polio well or should I say the Creator for a Time As This.
We live in a throw away society today.
No one knows how to fix anything.
Amen Brother...
May God Bless You
He did by blessing me with the best 30 years of my life.
I have a relative who has had a crutch since getting polio, decades ago.
I also contracted polio when I was five, in 1954 just before the vaccine reached us.
Mine was a mild case which chiefly weakened my left quadricep. I spent three weeks in the hospital lying on my back, which was no fun; but then I went home and led a normal life, with only an inadequate thigh as a daily reminder.
A truly sad story that turned happy from you, sir.
What a truly wonderful woman you were blessed to have in your life.
And you were her blessing.
Good mother!
Regards,
It was a rough time in my life when I met her. I was 28 and a widower of a couple months. My 23 year old wife whom I had intended to grow old with was called home one morning an hour after I left for work. She had sprained an ankle a couple days before and was on crutches. She threw a clot my dad was there when it happened she collapsed and was gone. I took a couple weeks off from work. Upon return I was offered a transfer to another nursing home because they needed a HVAC/Electrician because the one they had quit and where I was at had two.
I called my boss that night to tell him I was staying where I was and the words I'll take the transfer flew out of my mouth LOL. That set up how I met my second wife. She was a CNA at my new facility. Within 5 months we were married. It was not how we wanted to start out but some circumstances happening in her family when she went quad sped plans up fast.
It was an act of faith. While she was in ICU I came by after work and two preachers she knew were there and laid hands on her and prayed. As that was happening I was experiencing a peace in this world I had never known before nor since and an inaudible voice told me "It's going to be OK". After that some complications came up involving her future and her daughters who were early teens. Her dad wanted her in a nursing home and the girls adopted out. Well that didn't happen. I prayed and I talked to my parents and told them what all was going on and how we planned to stop it. They agreed to help us by taking the girls in until she got out of the hospital and as her husband I had the legal say instead of her dad.
Hind sight I can truly believe the voice I heard was true it was going to be OK. But why was I told that? Because I was facing and was going through the hardest time of my life and it was to strengthen me. It wasn't a promise she would be cured it was a promise it will be OK. The Lord via The Holy Spirit was the messenger.
Amen FRiend
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The Blessing and Love of God come to mind Looking to His Soon to be here Kingdom. We count our Blessings and there’s no room for the Troubles of This world.
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Maranatha!
I went to school with a girl who had a brace on her leg from it.
I also remember lining up at school and the nurse walking down the line with the plate of sugar cubes with pink in the middle.
My birth mother died in an iron lung from polio, in a Texas military hospital. It was 1953. She was only 27 years old. I was just three years old. She was a war bride from Australia. My father had been a B-24 bomber pilot in the South Pacific in WWII. I have no conscious memory of her. I have seen photos of this beautiful young woman, both before her polio, and during her last days in the iron lung. My older brother (three years older) has memories of her that I do not have.
Praise the LORD.
Reading WW2 newspapers included lots of stories about polio.
example: Aug15, 1945. They weren’t really sure how it was transmitted among people. Rockford Ill. had an epidemic. 100 people were stricken in the past 45 days, including 12 deaths. People were warned to stay out. The local army base put the town off limits. So they decided to spray the town with DDT, because doctors said that flies and mosquitos could transmit it.
Also in that paper: Washington DC and surrounding counties had a total of 84 polio victims, up another 3, so far this year. Rate of infection was 10% higher than last year.
There are other kinds of ventilators now days.
They could have hooked her up to one.🙄
In 1958 the doctors diagnosed me with polio. Flat on my back in full body cast in the hospital for 6 months. It wasn’t polio, but osteomyelitis in my hip. I remember almost nothing about it; I believe God wipes some memories to help you survive through life.
Recovered from that, but it caused sporadic health issues in my legs that continue to this day.
She could have been placed on a respirator.
As a child in that era I was horrified to see tv shows and news shows with iron lung patients helpless like that.
Yes, me also!
Several classmates had leg braces and worse were the pictures of people in iron lungs. What a horrible existence.
I vividly recall lining up for the sugar cubes...what I don’t recall is how many it took...I know it was more than one...maybe 3 times?
Thank God for the vaccine! Safe AND effective...unlike some I could mention...
I listened to a Darkhorse (Brett Weinstein) podcast with the author of the book “The Moth in the Iron Lung”. If I remember correctly, the gist of it was that someone brought an invasive moth over from overseas and it was decimating trees and they started using some chemicals on the fruit trees. People ate the fruits without washing them because that wasn’t a thing back then.
Going by memory so may be off a little….it is an interesting hypothesis though.
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