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 ...
To my way of thinking, the family merely pulled the plug on her. There are modern methods of providing aspiration for those who require this. Do you remember hearing the problem related to the scarcities of "ventilators" during the COVID debacle? Those machines do the very same thing.
What if the family though living in one of those for eighty years was punishment enough for her? I know know I’d rather die than be subjected to that.
Everyone in the building deals with this everyday. People complain, but alas nothing is done. Management does nothing. They don’t care and look to keep costs very low. They just fired over 600 people and are looking to cut more.
My office gets very hot during the summer. All of the offices have window air conditioning units. The one in my office is from the 1960s and has a broken knob. It still works. It is very loud and I cannot hear anything when it is on so I leave it off. I brought a small fan from home and use that when necessary. There is a window that I open sometimes.
Leaving the job is not an option now. People say that, but they don’t know everything.
My friend the Freeper MHGinTN, had polio that at about age 70 or so began to gradually worsen and disable and decrease his mobility. He died at about 77 and was to the point he had lost much if not most of his mobility.
He lived alone but was adamant about his independence.
My mother-in-law aged 85 is the same...............
And one suspense or drama anthology show had a person trapped in their iron lung as the killer came in to get them to prevent their being a witness to an earlier crime. Can’t remember which show.
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