Martha Ann Lillard spent more than seventy years inside a machine built before the Korean War. On June 26, the 78-year-old woman from Shawnee, Oklahoma, described as the last polio survivor in the United States still living in an iron lung, died after the 1940s-era device that kept her breathing began to break down and proved too old to repair. Her public obituary listed the cause of death as long-haul Covid.
Her story is not a policy debate. It is something rarer and harder to look at: a life shaped entirely by a disease America conquered, two years too late for one five-year-old girl in Oklahoma.
Lillard was diagnosed with polio on her fifth birthday in 1953. She told KFOR, the Oklahoma City television station that interviewed her shortly before her death:
"I woke up, and it was sunny outside, and I started to sit up, and my neck was killing me. I couldn't lift my head off the pillow."
Four days later she fell unconscious, unable to breathe or move. Doctors placed her inside an iron lung, a sealed metal cylinder that uses negative pressure to force air in and out of paralyzed lungs. She was five. The polio vaccine would not become widely available in America until 1955.
Lillard spent six months in the hospital learning to breathe on her own after her diagnosis. At the peak of her dependency, she lived inside the iron lung twenty-three hours a day. She had to relearn how to walk. She could attend school for only one hour per day. She took high school classes over the phone. She never graduated. She never went to prom.
At her healthiest, she still needed the machine roughly nine hours every night to sleep. She used a portable ventilator during waking hours. She tried modern respirators over the years, but none could generate the pressure her damaged lungs required.
Lillard explained the problem plainly to KFOR:
"None of them could get up to 21 pounds [per square inch], which is what I needed to breathe. So they just weren't effective."
So she stayed in the iron lung. For decades.
What makes Lillard's story remarkable is not the machine. It is what she did despite it. A GoFundMe fundraiser set up to honor her legacy described a woman who "spent her life as normally as possible." She painted. She wrote poems. She composed music for left-hand piano, her right arm was paralyzed. She lived with twenty-five percent lung capacity and scoliosis.
Her sister, Cindy McVey, said Lillard managed her own life for most of it.
"She didn't really require a caretaker until Covid-19. She fixed her own meals and, and took care of everything herself."
That changed when the pandemic arrived. Lillard contracted Covid twice. She also came down with shingles. The combined toll broke something that seventy years of polio had not. In the months before her death, she was inside the iron lung twenty-four hours a day. She could no longer breathe on her own while lying on her back. She could not sit up by herself.
The iron lung itself was failing, too. The device dated to the 1940s. Replacement parts had long since stopped being manufactured. McVey described the impossible maintenance situation to reporters.
"Some of the parts are from the chevs of the forties, and they're hard to locate. We have a spare motor, but we don't have anyone to put it back in if we needed it."
The fragility of the arrangement was not theoretical. Last year, a tornado knocked out power to Lillard's home. The iron lung stopped. Her husband, Baha Seleh, performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep her alive until help arrived.
Think about that for a moment. A woman in twenty-first-century America, dependent on a machine built during the Truman administration, kept alive during a power outage by her husband breathing into her mouth. No backup system. No institutional safety net. Just one man and a pair of lungs.
Polio was one of the great public health victories of the twentieth century. The Salk vaccine arrived in 1955 and, within a generation, effectively eliminated the disease in the United States. But for the children already infected, the ones who caught it in 1953, or 1952, or 1951, the vaccine came too late. They lived with the consequences for the rest of their lives.
Lillard was among the last of them. She did not choose her fate. She did not ask for a machine that would define her existence from age five to age seventy-eight. But she lived inside it with a resilience that her GoFundMe page captured simply: "Even as post-polio syndrome continued to affect her, she maintained a wonderful fighting attitude, making the most of what she had left and enjoying life as much as she could."
She did not merely survive. She painted, she wrote, she composed. She married. She managed her own household for decades. She outlasted the disease, the machine, and every reasonable expectation.
Lillard herself remembered the moment she was first placed in the iron lung as a small child. Doctors, she said, were reluctant to put children inside because they fought it.
"They usually didn't like to put children in because they fought it, but I didn't. When I got in it, I was tired. Always getting in there felt wonderful."
She was five years old, exhausted, unable to breathe. The machine gave her air. She accepted it without a fight. And then she spent the next seventy-three years proving that accepting help is not the same as accepting defeat.
Several questions remain unanswered. Whether any medical authority formally recognized Lillard as the last American polio survivor still dependent on an iron lung is unclear. The relationship between the iron lung's mechanical failure and her death is also ambiguous, the obituary points to long-haul Covid, while the broader narrative centers on a machine too old to sustain her. Both may be true. Illness and equipment failure are not mutually exclusive when a patient has twenty-five percent lung capacity and a seventy-year-old life-support device.
The GoFundMe fundraiser, titled "Honoring Martha Ann Lillard's Legacy," remains active. Its purpose beyond memorializing her was not detailed.
Martha Ann Lillard did not live a normal life. She lived something harder, an extraordinary life forced into an impossible shape, and she made it work anyway. In an era that hands out the word "brave" like candy, she was the real thing.
