Martha Ann Lillard, the last known person in the United States to rely on an iron lung, died on June 26 in Shawnee, Oklahoma at the age of 78.
Her cause of death was long-haul COVID-19. She had used the iron lung for 73 years.
She contracted polio on her fifth birthday, June 8, 1953, two years before Jonas Salk's vaccine was declared safe. She woke up with a sore throat.
By the fourth day she could not breathe. She could not move her arms or legs. "The only noise that you can make when you can't breathe is clicking your tongue," she recalled in a 2017 interview. "And that whole dark room just sounded like a big room full of chickens just cluck-cluck-clucking."
In her healthiest years, she used the iron lung only at night, nine hours while she slept, and lived independently the rest of the time. She painted.
She wrote poetry. She composed music for the left-handed piano, since her right arm was paralyzed.
She volunteered at the Pottawatomie County Humane Society, a local daycare and a crisis phone line. She got married twice. She fixed her own meals.
She took care of herself. "She didn't really require a caretaker until COVID-19," her sister Cindy McVey said.
Long COVID complicated her final years. She began spending more and more time in the machine.
In the last eight months of her life, she was confined to it full time.
She refused to switch to a modern ventilator. Nothing worked like the iron lung. "When I got in it, I was tired. Always getting in there felt wonderful," she said. "Sometimes when I get in there, I say, 'Thank you.'"
She is survived by her husband Baha Seleh, whom she met in a Yahoo chat room in 2005 and married in February of this year, and her sister Cindy.
A GoFundMe has been set up to help with funeral expenses.