Martha Lillard

Martha Ann Lillard was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on June 8, 1948, the daughter of Thomas M. Lillard and Gloria June (Green) Lillard. Her grandparents included Judge John L. Green and Grace A. (Hilton) Green, and Halbert G. Lillard.

On June 8, 1953, she celebrated her fifth birthday at an amusement park. On about June 17 she woke with a sore throat and neck pain and could not lift her head from the pillow. She was diagnosed with polio at the hospital. Spanish-language outlets reported that after four days she fell unconscious, paralyzed. The disease left her paralyzed from the neck down and weakened her breathing muscles. "The night before I was paralyzed, the neighbor children ate out of the same bowl of pancake batter that I did," she recalled in 2013. "They just had to pray that nobody got it."

She spent six months in the hospital inside an iron lung. The Salk vaccine was introduced in April 1955, too late for her. "If my mother would have had the opportunity to give me the vaccine, she would have done that," she said.

Lillard was largely homeschooled. She attended Jefferson Grade School for a short time each day (an hour according to her obituary, two hours according to her sister) and was tutored the rest of the time. She attended Shawnee High School through a school-to-home telephone system that let her follow lessons and talk with teachers and classmates via an intercom in each classroom. She was a member of the National Honor Society. She later said a childhood friend, Karen Rapp, taught her to appreciate small things as they watched ants and built little villages of grass huts together.

Through physical, occupational and water therapy she regained use of her legs and partial use of her left arm, and taught herself to walk again. She chose to keep sleeping in an iron lung every night rather than switch to modern ventilators. "I've tried all the forms of ventilation, and the iron lung is the most efficient and the best and the most comfortable way," she told Radio Diaries. Positive pressure devices, she said, caused severe inflammation and worsened asthma linked to post-polio syndrome.

Her family helped her live on her own terms. Her father found hotels with doors wide enough for the machine so the family could take road trips to Missouri with a custom trailer, relatives built a contraption that let her open the iron lung herself, and a car was adapted so she could drive.

In the 1990s, when her machine was breaking down, she searched hospitals and museums for a replacement and bought a 1940s iron lung from a man in Utah. Belts needed replacing every few weeks, the cot every six months and the motor about every 12 years, and the foam collars that sealed it around her neck were no longer made. During an ice storm her emergency generator failed and she was trapped without heat; when she finally reached 911, the responders did not know what an iron lung was but got the generator running. In 2025, when a tornado knocked out power and her generator failed again, her husband kept her breathing with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until help arrived.

After Paul Alexander died on March 11, 2024, she became the last known person in the United States still using an iron lung.

Lillard was a member of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Shawnee. She volunteered for many years with the Pottawatomie County Humane Society, did volunteer work at a local daycare center and coordinated volunteers for Shawnee's crisis phone line. She cared for her beagles, helped with animal rescue by cross-posting dogs on Facebook, painted landscapes, wrote poetry, composed music for the left hand piano and loved old Hollywood movies.

She could not have children or hold a steady job because of her physical limitations. Her first husband was Ray Stapp; she said they met in 1989 and were together for 28 years until he moved into a nursing home. After September 11, 2001, she met Baha Salh of Mallawi, Egypt, in an online chat room. After a 22-year courtship he obtained a visa, moved to Oklahoma and married her in February 2026, caring for her at home.

Lillard caught Covid twice during the pandemic; before that she already had less than 25 percent lung capacity. For her last five years she could not leave home, and for the final two she was in the iron lung nearly 24 hours a day.

She died in Shawnee on June 26, 2026, aged 78. Her self-written obituary, published July 2, says she died of long-haul Covid-19. Her sister said the death certificate listed chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome. Services were held at Resthaven Memorial Cemetery on June 29, 2026, with the Reverend Tom Dahlman officiating. KFOR reported her death on July 8, and the Associated Press, NBC News, the BBC, CNN en Español and others followed. She was survived by her husband Baha Salh, Ray Stapp, her sister Cindy McVey and brother-in-law Daryl, cousins, nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

Lillard became a living reminder of what polio did before vaccination. In 2013 she told NBC News, as the disease reappeared in Syria, "I think the word is to get your child vaccinated. Why would we let somebody have to go back through that again?" After her death her sister Cindy McVey used interviews to warn against growing vaccine hesitancy: "Polio is terrible. The disease disfigures, disables and leaves people trapped." A friend of McVey's had been part of the vaccine trials in the same year Martha fell ill. "It was that close," McVey said.