Martha Mason] was a Lattimore-born writer in North Carolina spent 61 years in iron lungs. Before she got sick, as a little girl, she knew what she wanted. She wanted to become a writer. Then an epidemic of polio occurred and everything stopped. Almost half a century later, her wish came true. This is the story of the strong and courageous Martha Mason,
In 1948, when the polio epidemic broke out, Martha's thirteen-year-old brother Gaston first fell ill and died of the disease. Shortly after his funeral, Martha began to feel the same symptoms as her brother, and she soon ended up in treatment herself, where she stayed for a full year. Upon leaving treatment, she was paralyzed from the neck down. She did not come out of the hospital alone but with huge iron lungs. Iron lungs are designed just for the victims of this paralyzing disease because they allow it to breathe independently. Yet despite her survival, doctors were not optimistic and gave her only another year to live.
Martha decided to live the best she could and came to terms with her condition. Upon returning home, she continued her education in her native Lattimore in the US state of North Carolina. Thanks to the small community in which she lived, which consisted of several hundred people, the professors came to her home voluntarily and gave her private lessons. Martha was full of desire for knowledge and when she finished high school she enrolled in college and left with her parents from Lattimore. She lived on campus with her parents and followed the lectures over the intercom. After graduating with the best grades in English, she returned home, where, with her mother's help, she began working as a journalist. She dictated the texts and her mother wrote them down.
Loss of parents
The changes in his life came with his father's heart attack, after which he could no longer live on his own, so Martha's mother was no longer able to work with her daughter because she had to take care of two adults. After her father's death, her mother's health deteriorated and after a series of strokes, she became demented. Martha, despite the fact that she became aggressive due to her illness, did not let her into the home, but took care of her and the household, getting two assistants. After her mother's death in the late 1980s, she was left alone, but did not give up. Advances in technology have meant a huge and good change in her life.
Technology has opened up many possibilities for her
In the mid-1990s, Marta acquired a computer with voice control, which opened up a whole new and unknown world to her. With the development of technology, doctors recommended other ways to live outside of iron lungs, but she did not want to be intubated, just as she did not want to stay in the hospital little by little, so she eliminated such possibilities. Martha led an independent life, entertaining people and running the household. She wrote a book called Life in the Rhythm of a Iron Lung, which was published in 2003. The following year she received an honorary doctorate. A documentary called Martha in Lattimore ("Martha in Lattimore") was made about her in 2005, and she appeared in the documentary about polio in The Final Inch, which was nominated for the 2009 Oscars. .
The end of life
She lived in a small community where people took care of each other, so when she couldn’t come to them they came to her. When the power went out, local firefighters would come to check her backup generator because a power outage and a generator failure would be fatal for her. She died at the age of seventy-one peacefully in her sleep in 2009. In addition to leaving a deep mark as a person who has influenced other people’s lives, she is known, among other things, as the person who has lived the longest in iron lungs, and that has been for a full 60 years.
