Martha Lillard, the last U.S. polio patient using an iron lung, died June 26 in Oklahoma at 78. Her death closes a rare link to a time when the machine was still keeping polio survivors alive.
Her sister, Cindy McVey, said Lillard had been diagnosed with polio when she was 5 and later spent much of her life in the iron lung cylinder that encased her body. The chamber’s air pressure forced air in and out of her lungs, and she wrote in her own obituary that she was an avid Beagle lover and assisted in animal rescue as a cross poster on Facebook.
Cindy McVey and Baha Salh
McVey said Lillard lived far longer than doctors expected. “They told her she wasn't supposed to live past 20 years old,” she said to The. “She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.”
McVey said Lillard and Baha Salh communicated online for more than 20 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then married in February after he obtained a visa to travel to Oklahoma. “They're really soulmates,” McVey said. “He's extremely brokenhearted.”
CDC and U.S. polio cases
The death also draws a line under the last living U.S. patient known to still depend on an iron lung. The CDC says vaccines became available starting in 1955, and a national vaccination campaign cut annual U.S. polio cases to fewer than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s.
Polio was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 1979, but Lillard’s life carried the earlier era forward. She was paralyzed from the neck down, went to grade school for two hours a day as a child, and was tutored the rest of the time.
Oklahoma and the iron lung
She later attended Shawnee High School using a phone system that let her interact with teachers and classmates through an intercom in her classrooms. Her family also took road trips to Missouri in a custom trailer, and she was even able to drive for a time.
With therapy, Lillard regained partial use of her left arm and use of her legs, though she could move only her left arm side to side at her waist. She spent many years living alone and preparing her own meals. During the coronavirus pandemic, she got COVID twice, and before that she had less than 25% lung capacity.
For the last five years of her life, she was not able to leave home as breathing became harder. For the past two years, she was in the iron lung nearly 24 hours a day. Her death leaves behind the question of what specific circumstances led to that decline, even after years of living on her own and adapting to the machine that sustained her.
