For over 35 years, a Missouri woman has enlisted her husband and a kind
friend to help her go through the hourlong process of climbing into what
is believed to be one of the last remaining iron lungs still
functioning today. Mona Randolph, now 82, was struck by polio as an
adult in 1956, and relies on the 75-year-old machine to live six nights
per week,
The Kansas City Star reported. Randolph, who has no function
in her left arm and limited use of her right arm, uses a CPAP during the
day, but said the machine forces air unnaturally into her lungs, and
she prefers the methods of the 700-pound machine instead. Randolph, a
former piano player who met her husband at church in the 80s, when her
post-polio symptoms had set in, said the first sign of polio was a
strange headache while on a bus trip home. She was 20 years old.
“Everything was off-key,” she told the news outlet.
“I couldn’t stand to hear people talking in the kitchen. They’d whisper
and it would hurt my ears. I couldn’t stand any light. Mom put blankets
over the windows.”
Her symptoms worsened on the third day and she was
struggling to breathe, prompting doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital to place
her in an iron lung.
“They happened to have one in the basement because people were not using them much then,” she told The Kansas City Star.
The iron lung, which was invented in the 1920s, was
often used on polio patients who were unable to breathe after the virus
paralyzed muscle groups in the chest. Polio, a crippling and potentially
deadly disease, spreads from person to-person and can infect a
patient’s brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),
almost all children who get the recommended doses of vaccine will be
protected from polio, which has helped keep the U.S. polio-free since
1979.
However, before the vaccine’s introduction, polio
outbreaks crippled an average of 35,000 people per year in the U.S. in
the late 1940s to early 1950s. According to the CDC, public health
officials imposed quarantines, and parents were frightened to let their
children go outside. When Randolph was diagnosed in 1956, the vaccine
was largely made available to children but adults were thought to be at
low risk of transmission.
The iron lung was used on patients for a few weeks before they were
able to recover and either breathe on their own, or with the use of
assistive respirators. The patient’s head is the only part of the body
visible once the machine is closed, and the neck collar is adjusted to
keep it airtight.
Randolph, who was able to live without the iron lung
until her symptoms worsened in the late 70s, cannot climb into the
machine by herself, and has to be put in her pajamas by husband Mark,
and then loaded into a sling that hoists her from her bed over to the
machine, The Kansas City Star reported.
Then someone has to adjust her blankets to ensure she is not cold, and
turn on the machine before the process is repeated in reverse the
following morning.
If a piece of the machine malfunctions, Mark, a
software engineer, or her cousin, a former aircraft mechanic, work on
the repairs, Gizmodo reported. Mark told the news outlet that running
the machine and associated repairs cost about the same as buying a new
car each year.
“The ‘yellow submarine’ is my necessary trusted, mechanical friend,” she previously told Gizmodo. “I approach it with relief in store at night and thankfully leave it with relief in the morning.”
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