A Life Doctors Said Would End at 20

Martha Lillard had just turned 5 years old when she was diagnosed with polio and began depending on an iron lung to live. She died on June 26 in Oklahoma — the last U.S. polio patient known to have used the machine. She was 78 years old. Doctors had given her far less time than that.

“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,” said her younger sister, Cindy McVey. “She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.” That drive carried her through more than seven decades inside a machine most people have only seen in history books.

Life Inside — and Outside — the Machine

Lillard slept in the iron lung cylinder that encased her body as the air pressure in the chamber forced air in and out of her lungs. The iron lung uses a negative pressure system — powered by a motor, its bellows suck air out of the cylinder, creating a vacuum around the patient’s body and forcing the lungs to expand. For Lillard, this wasn’t a temporary measure. It was her life.

Even with the large metal device encircling her body for hours each day for most of her life, Lillard found a way to drive a vehicle, took up painting, and cared for her beloved beagles. As a child, she went to grade school for just two hours a day and was tutored the rest of the time. She attended Shawnee High School using a phone system that allowed her to interact with teachers and classmates through an intercom in her classrooms. Her family even went on road trips to Missouri, thanks to a custom trailer and her father calling hotels ahead of time to find out if they had doors wide enough to accommodate the machine Lillard slept in.

McVey described her sister as artistic and creative — she wrote poems and composed songs, and even wrote her own obituary, which is now posted online by a funeral home. Despite being unable to reach upward, she spent many years living alone and preparing her own meals, and the internet later allowed her to meet her future husband.

COVID-19 Took What Polio Could Not

During the coronavirus pandemic, Lillard contracted COVID-19 twice. Before getting the virus, she had already been living with less than 25% lung capacity. The last five years of her life, she wasn’t able to leave home as it became harder to breathe. For her final two years, she was in the iron lung nearly 24 hours a day. Her official cause of death was listed as chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome, though her sister also attributed the death to long COVID.

Lillard had updated her own obituary to say she “died of long-haul Covid 19,” and McVey added the date of her death. It was a final act of self-expression from a woman who had always refused to let her circumstances define her story.

A Warning Her Sister Fears Is Going Unheard

A vaccine for polio became available beginning in 1955, and in the U.S., polio was declared eliminated in 1979, meaning it no longer routinely spread among the population. A national vaccination campaign had cut the annual number of U.S. cases to fewer than 100 in the 1960s and fewer than 10 in the 1970s. Lillard’s life was, in many ways, a living reminder of what the world looked like before that breakthrough — and what it could look like again.

Today, vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. is growing, and health officials in the Trump administration are suggesting more vaccines become optional. Kirk Milhoan, the chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC, suggested earlier this year that polio vaccines should be optional. That type of rhetoric worries McVey deeply. “Polio is terrible,” she said through tears. “The disease disfigures, disables and leaves people trapped. We had it under control here and now we have all these people who aren’t vaccinating their children.”

McVey worries that memories of polio are too far removed for people to grasp how serious it can be. “They may think there’s problems with the vaccine,” she said, “but there’s a whole lot more problems if they don’t vaccinate.” Lillard contracted polio the year before the vaccine even came out — a cruel twist of timing that shaped her entire existence. Now that she is gone, her sister’s voice may be one of the last carrying that firsthand warning forward.