I found this article to be pretty incredible; inspiring to say the least. Reminds me of the saying “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet”. Not that anyone here should feel any different about life, but it sure helps put things in persepective for me when I get a little off course…
Andy
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Two among a very few embrace the iron lung as if their lives depended on it
By Mark Sauer
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
November 21, 2002
JERRY RIFE / Union-Tribune
John Goodman is helped into his iron lung by Rafael Abreu, one of his two caregivers. “It’s always there for me, ike a heartbeat,” he says.
An iron lung is a big tube, nearly 3 feet in diameter, 7 feet long and weighing 700 pounds. Like a coffin, it dominates a room.
Most people old enough to remember the iron lung associate it with polio, the once dreaded scourge of summer. They remember sad photos of hospital wards filled with kids whose lungs were crippled by the virus, just their heads sticking out of the massive machines.
But for John Goodman and Dolores Thompson, the iron lung is anything but a symbol of tragedy.
Goodman, who has used the machine for 20 years, states flatly, “I wouldn’t be alive if not for my iron lung.”
Thompson, an iron-lung user for 52 years who may be the oldest American still using the machine, describes it as “an embracing and tireless old friend.”
The two friends are among the 100 or so Americans – and are probably the only ones in San Diego – still using an iron lung.
Iron lungs have not been manufactured for at least a decade, and there are only 150 or fewer of them still in working condition in the United States. They were replaced by respiratory devices that are small and portable, but not necessarily more efficient or effective.
“I just feel so comfortable when I’m in it,” said Thompson, whose iron lung takes up much of her bedroom in her University Heights apartment. “It’s the only place I can breathe without effort. It is always there for me, like a heartbeat.”
Goodman and Thompson, who have never met but talk by telephone, appear to have little in common beyond the iron lung and an uncommon drive to live life as fully as possible.
Goodman, who lives in a Clairemont apartment, is 31 and has had “spinal muscle atrophy,” a severe form of muscular dystrophy, since birth.
Though he has never walked (he weighs only 50 pounds), he has earned a bachelor’s degree in filmmaking at SDSU. A free-lance screenwriter, he wrote the script for an episode of TV’s “Malcolm in the Middle” which aired last spring. Last year, he won an award from Columbia University for “Angels of Light,” a documentary he wrote and directed on handicapped children at an Ensenada orphanage (his Web site is www.johnbradfordgoodman.com).
Thompson, 62, contracted polio as a child. She is able to walk, but suffers severe breathing problems and has minimal use of her arms and hands. This is the result of post-polio syndrome in which debilitating effects of the disease return decades later.
Thompson fills her days writing poetry and working as a peace activist and volunteer for Amnesty International.
Goodman has for 13 years relied on his friend and roommate, Tony Baredes, for assistance. Thompson has a county-paid nursing assistant, Kathy Brock, nine hours a day, and sublets a room in her apartment to a college student on whom she can rely in case of emergency.
“But Dexter is the one who really takes care of me, all three shifts,” said Thompson, smiling and pointing to her plump orange cat.
Breathing lessons Most people breathe without thinking about it. But Dolores Thompson and John Goodman think about breathing all the time. They plan their lives around the time they need to be in their iron lungs.
Because their breathing capacity is so limited, Thompson and Goodman exhaust themselves quickly when breathing unaided. Each sleeps in the iron lung and uses it several other times daily.
“Being in the iron lung,” Thompson said, “is like being in heaven. It’s the only time I can take a really deep breath.”
The iron lung was invented in the mid-1920s by Philip Drinker, a Harvard engineer looking for a machine that would sustain breathing for victims of industrial accidents.
Drinker came up with the idea of bellows driven by an electric motor within an airtight tank. The motion of the bellows pushes air in and out of the tank, creating negative and positive pressure. The negative pressure contracts the patient’s diaphragm, causing inhalation; the positive pressure expands the diaphragm, causing exhalation.
Drinker’s machine was modified in the early 1930s by John Emerson, a Massachusetts inventor, and before long, iron lungs were manufactured by the thousands and in use across the nation and the Western world.
But with the eradication of polio in the ’50s and ’60s, and the invention of portable ventilators, the iron lung became obsolete.
“Physicians don’t order or inquire about iron lungs at all now,” said Cheryl Needham, product manager for home ventilators at Respironics, a Pittsburgh-based firm that maintains iron lungs and distributes other respiratory equipment across the country.
Thompson has had her iron lung since she arrived in San Diego from her native Virginia in 1971. Goodman, who grew up in Austin, Texas, said he “wore my first one out” and got his second iron lung when he moved to Los Angeles nearly a decade ago to pursue his film career.
Both Goodman and Thompson use other “positive-force ventilators,” which force air (and sometimes medicine) into their lungs through a breathing tube. But no other breathing device is as reliable as the iron lung, they say.
Goodman never leaves home without his.
When he and his assistant spent three days in Ensenada filming “Angels of Light,” they rented a trailer and hauled the iron lung. They do the same thing if he needs to go to Los Angeles on business.
Goodman, who has a wry sense of humor and describes himself as a sports fanatic (he loves going to Padres games), said he realizes few people with his severe disease live as long as he has. He views the hours spent in his iron lung as an investment in life itself.
“I have big plans – I’m determined to win an Oscar, maybe several Oscars,” said Goodman, who said he has three screenplays being marketed by his manager in Hollywood.
“The doctors told my parents I would be dead by age 3, so I don’t listen to doctors’ predictions. I figure I’ll continue to use my iron lung and to live and work until I am ready to die, whenever that might be.”
Post-polio syndrome
support groups
offer camaraderie
In his Oscar-winning 1997 documentary, “Breathing Lessons,” polio victim Mark O’Brien described his iron lung this way: “It’s huge and ugly and yellow, but it works.”
O’Brien, a UC Berkeley grad who died in 1999 at age 49, was a quadriplegic who could spend only short periods outside of his iron lung.
Unlike O’Brien, many people who contracted polio as children recovered use of limbs and muscles that control breathing. But as many as 40 percent of victims have seen affected muscles deteriorate decades later, the result of post-polio syndrome.
These local post-polio groups meet regularly:
North County Post Polio Support group; contact Mary Timmons, (760) 738-0560, [email protected].
San Diego Polio Survivors group; contact Rick Kneeshaw, (858) 586-4011,