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By JOE DEPRIEST
Apr 2, 2003 : 2:12 am ET
LATTIMORE, N.C. -- Three days after her brother died
of polio in 1948, Martha Mason went to bed terrified she had the virus.
Mason, 11, hadn't told her devastated parents how
much her body hurt. She didn't want them to cry any more.
But as of that night, Mason never walked again.
Paralyzed from the neck down, she's spent most of the
last 54 years lying inside an iron lung, an 800-pound, 7-foot airtight tube
that breathes for her. She may be the oldest American still using an iron
lung every day, respiratory equipment experts say. Now she spends only a few
minutes each day outside the lung.
"Despite the inconveniences my useless body has
caused others -- and me -- I consider life an adventure worth waking up for
every morning," Mason, 65, writes in "Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron
Lung," published in March by best-selling author Jerry Bledsoe's Down Home
Press in Asheboro.
Mason's fierce spirit has shielded her from
self-pity; she's strong-willed, surprisingly optimistic and ready to talk
about books, movies, news from Iraq or a Wake Forest University football
game.
She's also a realist.
In the memoir she writes: "I'm not advocating a
mindless, contrived, be-happy-in-agony philosophy of life. I live with a
stable of nightmares, but hope keeps them in harness."
Through her voice-activated computer, Mason carries
on a worldwide e-mail correspondence, reads at least four daily newspapers,
including the London Times, listens to classical music and explores any
direction her imagination leads her.
Mason's childhood friend and editor, former Davidson
College English professor Charles Cornwell, encouraged her to write an
autobiography.
"The story of a woman in an iron lung is sad in the
abstract," said Cornwell, now living in Charleston. "But when you meet
Martha face to face, it's different. You come away feeling good. What she's
done in her condition is a great tribute to the human spirit."
Mason survived a devastating scourge, also known as
infantile paralysis, that killed thousands and disabled millions only a few
decades ago.
The polio virus infected people who had ingested
minute amounts of fecal matter from contaminated water or unsanitary
facilities. Children were kept indoors as the deadly virus spread through
big cities and towns like Lattimore, population 420, about 60 miles west of
Charlotte in Cleveland County.
Many who did contract polio became permanently
paralyzed as the virus attacked motor neurons in the brain stem, reducing
breathing capacity. Those patients often had to use an iron lung.
Invented in the mid-1920s by Harvard engineer Philip
Drinker, the iron lung is a sealed chamber with electrically driven bellows
in which air pressure is alternately reduced and increased effect breathing.
Iron lungs filled hospitals during polio epidemics of
the '40s and '50s, but the bulky machines were eventually replaced by
smaller, portable ventilators.
Dr. Jonas Salk's vaccine had almost eradicated the
virus in the United States by the 1960s. Today, polio is still found in west
and central Africa and south Asia.
When Mason contracted polio, iron lungs were the only
breathing technology available. She's tried other devices, but likes the
iron lung better.
"I continued with the `work horse,'" she said. "Now,
I'm sure there are things out there I could use, but my lifestyle is pretty
set after more than a half-century.
"An iron lung is low maintenance and can be operated
by people without special training. These yellow landlocked submarines are
immensely dependable."
Around-the-clock caretakers stay with her in the
100-year-old house where she's lived since the age of 5.
Her home within that home is the big, yellow tube
powered by an electric motor with a generator backup. It sighs rhythmically
in a room filled with books and photos, including the last pre-polio shot of
Mason: a tall, skinny girl smiling beside her bicycle.
Today, visitors see only her head, resting on a
pillow outside the lung. Her softly curled hair is white now, the
once-athletic body motionless, but her smile is the same. She speaks with a
soft Southern accent.
As a young woman, polio didn't deter her from a
college education.
Mason spent at least 20 hours in her iron lung every
day, but she received a two-year degree from Gardner-Webb College (now
University) in Boiling Springs and a degree in English from Wake Forest
University in Winston-Salem. Mason and her parents lived on Wake's campus,
where she stayed in her room and listened to class lectures through an
intercom system.
In 1960, she graduated first in her class and was
inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
Mason achieved her goals, but darkness sometimes
seeped in. "Occasionally a shadow of regret crept in to momentarily keep the
sun from shining in my world," she writes.
Mason always dreamed of writing, and as a child glued
her name to books, pretending she was the author. She loved to read, and
while she was in the iron lung her mother turned the pages of thousands of
books for her daughter. (Years later, she got an electric page-turner.)
In the book jacket, N.C. novelist Reynolds Price, who
is partially paralyzed from a spinal tumor, said Mason "writes with
eloquence and fearless clarity about one of the most extraordinary lives
I've ever known."
Part of the tension in Mason's book comes from the
relationship with her mother. After years as her daughter's caretaker,
Euphra Mason's personality began to change because of a series of
mini-strokes in the late 1980s, about 10 years after Martha Mason's father
had died.
Euphra Mason turned on her daughter, slapped and
cursed her. Martha Mason, helpless in an iron lung, feared her own mother.
A stroke finally left Euphra Mason in a childlike
state. In 1998, she died after another stroke.
Mason kept working on the memoir, pushing deeper into
the past, trying to recapture childhood days when she could still walk and
run.
"Some of this stuff I've never talked about," Mason
said. "Even my closest friends aren't aware of some of my feelings and
thoughts."
Mason lives on a quiet side street in Lattimore. She
can't go to town so town comes to her.
Friends stop by for gossip or advice. Book clubs meet
there to discuss everything from "Moby Dick" to mysteries by Patricia
Cornwell, whom Mason has known since Cornwell reported for The Observer.
In a large room dominated by the iron lung, friends
gather at dinner parties by candlelight and consume bottles of wine. Mason
eats lying down.
Friends bring baskets of wildflowers and videos of
weddings, birthday parties, funerals, outings at the mall and vacations. A
visitor once brought a bottle of ants to help Mason feel close to nature.
The visitor flow is steady. Mason is an engaging
conversationalist. People come, drawn not by pity but by the joy of the
visit.
"Everybody loves her," said retired schoolteacher
Polly Fite, who has known Mason 43 years. "She makes you feel like you're
important. When you go see Martha, you think, `I really don't know anything
about overcoming obstacles.' Your own problems don't seem that much
anymore."
Mason considers her book a tribute to her friends who
have brought the world closer to her.
"I'm happy with who I am, where I am," Mason said. "I
wouldn't have chosen this life, certainly. But given this life, I've
probably had the best situation anyone could ask for."
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