The last U.S. polio survivor still using an iron lung died this summer after the aging machine began to fail and no one was available to repair it.
Martha Ann Lillard passed away June 26 at age 78, and it’s taken me weeks to gather my thoughts about the situation.
Many of you know that I had polio at age 3 – in 1955, the same year that the polio vaccine came out. I was hospitalized for a month. Some of my memories from that time:
– The watch on the nurse’s arm as she held me during the spinal tap (Mama said I screamed). I was entranced by the second hand’s movement.
– The huge hospital ward with long rows of beds. The pretty little blonde to my left didn’t make it. I’ve thought about her a lot through the years.
– The small Black boy – a fellow patient – whom I kissed on the cheek when I was leaving. Having that as part of my life experience has always stayed with me.
– And, yes, being inserted into a big metal machine that for decades I couldn’t really believe was an iron lung because I came out of the polio experience relatively unscathed. I don’t remember not being able to breathe, or even struggling to breathe.
Now, reading about Martha Ann brought these few but powerful remembrances back, but this time with a different perspective.
At 3 years old, I didn’t know how sick I was. I certainly didn’t understand that the little girl in the next bed could die – or that I could, too. Now I grasp the enormity of the situation. I realize how easily my story could have been that little girl’s. Or Martha Ann’s.
Martha Ann contracted polio in 1953, shortly after her fifth birthday. After six months in the hospital spending 23 hours a day in the iron lung, she got to go home. Her right arm remained paralyzed, but she regained the ability to walk, and her lungs grew stronger. She eventually used the machine mostly while sleeping. In her final years, however, suffering from long Covid, she reportedly spent nearly all her time inside it.
Martha Ann lived 73 years after contracting polio. I have lived 71 years since contracting it. Those two numbers stop me in my tracks.
Our lives took very different paths after two little girls, born just four years apart, suffered the same frightening disease in the 1950s.
Then there’s always that other little girl. She didn’t get 70 more years. She didn’t even get one more year.
Today, I realize that sometimes we recognize our blessings when we receive them. Other times, it may take us decades to understand just how great they were.
As a preschooler, I didn’t know to be thankful that I could breathe without a machine. I didn’t know to be thankful that I would walk out of that hospital and grow up, go to school, have a career, marry, travel, sing, write columns – live an ordinary life filled with extraordinary blessings. I just knew I was going home.
Also, somewhere in that hospital room was a little Black boy who was sick, too. In Louisiana in 1955, when so much of life outside those hospital walls was divided by race, we shared the same room. But before I left, one 3-year-old child kissed another child goodbye.
I don’t know what became of him. I hope he had a good life. But I know what became of me.
I was given a lifetime.
The death of a woman I never knew has reminded me, once again, just how precious that gift is.
Thank you, Martha Ann, for that.
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Sallie Rose Hollis lives in Ruston and retired from Louisiana Tech as an associate professor of journalism and the assistant director of the News Bureau. She can be contacted at sallierose@mail.com.
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