Last U.S. polio patient using iron lung dies at 78

Martha Lillard was five years old when polio took her breath away—literally. The disease paralyzed her from the neck down, and for the next 73 years, she lived inside a machine: an iron lung, a cylindrical chamber that used air pressure to push oxygen in and out of her lungs while she slept. She died on June 26 in Oklahoma at 78, the last American still dependent on the device. Her sister, Cindy McVey, believes long-haul COVID-19 was the final blow.

Doctors told the young Martha Lillard she would not see her twentieth birthday. They were wrong by nearly six decades. "She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life," McVey recalled, speaking to the Associated Press on Friday. The death certificate lists chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome as the causes, but McVey is clear about what she witnessed: her sister contracted COVID-19 twice during the pandemic, and the second infection, combined with lungs already operating at less than 25 percent capacity, proved insurmountable.

What made Lillard's survival remarkable was not merely its length but its texture. She attended grade school for two hours a day as a child, tutored for the rest. She went to Shawnee High School through an intercom system, speaking to teachers and classmates through speakers in their classrooms while she remained at home in her iron lung. Her father called hotels ahead of family road trips to Missouri, asking if their doors were wide enough to accommodate the machine she slept in. She even drove a car for a time. To her younger sister, now 75, none of it seemed extraordinary. "To me, it was just normal," McVey said.

The internet became Lillard's window to the world. She learned about her own disease, studied topics that fascinated her, and in a chat room after September 11, 2001, she met a man in Egypt. They communicated online for more than two decades before he obtained a visa. Baha Salh and Martha Lillard married in February 2026, after more than twenty years of connection across continents. "They were really soulmates," McVey said. "He's extremely brokenhearted."

Lillard lived alone for many years, preparing her own meals despite being able to move only her left arm side to side at her waist. She was artistic and creative—she wrote poems, composed songs, and volunteered with the Humane Society, rescuing beagles and posting about animal rescue on Facebook. She even wrote her own obituary, which now appears online through a funeral home, later updating it to note that she "died of long-haul Covid 19."

Polio was once America's most terrifying disease, striking thousands of children each year with paralysis. Vaccines arrived in 1955, and a national campaign reduced cases to fewer than 100 annually by the 1960s, fewer than 10 by the 1970s. In 1979, the disease was declared eliminated in the United States. Lillard became a living monument to an era that vaccination had nearly erased from memory.

In her final years, she and her sister searched desperately for someone who could repair her iron lung, one of several machines she had relied on throughout her life. The last five years were the hardest—breathing became increasingly difficult, and she could no longer leave home. For the past two years, she spent nearly every hour inside the machine. When McVey spoke about no longer needing to find a repair person, her voice broke. "But since she's the last one, we don't need that anymore," she said through tears.