I was the last person in an iron lung at Vanderbilt University Medical Center
It was in a storage room. It still worked. For some reason, I was allowed to get in it.
May 15, 2023
Shortly after I became a writer in the VUMC News Office — this would have been about 1983 — I worked on a story about a patient who, earlier in her life, had spent more than a year in an iron lung. She was a delightful woman, and I spent quite a bit of time at her house interviewing her, gathering information and quotes for the story.
After I got back to the office and was writing the story, I kept thinking about what it would have been like to have lived in the confinement of an iron lung for such a long time. I wondered if VUMC still had an operating iron lung that I could see.
He flipped on the flickering florescent lights of the storage room, and, in the middle of a bunch of other castoff stuff was the last iron lung at Vanderbilt.
I phoned Respiratory Therapy and the person who answered put me in touch with a young guy who was a respiratory therapist who said that, as a matter of fact, there still was a functioning iron lung at VUMC. It was in a storage room in Medical Center North. He agreed to meet me there.
He flipped on the flickering florescent lights of the storage room, and, in the middle of a bunch of other castoff stuff was the last iron lung at Vanderbilt. It was a little beat up looking, as you might expect; it was decades old at this point. The therapist (I don’t remember his name) found an outlet and plugged it in and showed me how it worked. He said that no patients had used it anytime recently but that it was still functional.
We stood there looking at it for a few seconds.
“Can I get in?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said with a shrug.
He opened it up, I climbed in, and he swung the hinges closed and flipped the latches that sealed the tank. My head stuck out the end, but I was otherwise enclosed in the metal tube.
It occurred to me about this time, far too late, that this was a real Stephen King scenario. I didn’t really know this guy very well. I was locked in. He could have flipped off the lights, locked the door, and left me there in the dark listening to his receding footsteps.
Thankfully, he didn’t. What he did do was lean over my head and ask, “Want me to turn it on?”
“Yeah, let’s give that a try,” I said.
He turned on the motor – surprisingly loud with the sound echoing off the metal shelves and tiled concrete floor – and the bellows at the foot of the tube began opening and closing, increasing and decreasing the air pressure within the tank.
I continued to try to talk and discovered that you can only speak while exhaling. My words had to be timed to when the machine was forcing air out of my lungs. Otherwise, as the forced inhale of air began, my voice faded like the volume being turned down on a radio.
At first, since I was not paralyzed, I attempted to breathe normally but soon had to give up and let the rising and falling air pressure within the iron lung force air in and out of my lungs. It was forcing me to breathe on its rhythm. I found out later that patients using iron lungs who began recovering would begin fighting the machine. That’s what I was doing.
I continued to try to talk and discovered that you can only speak while exhaling. My words had to be timed to when the machine was forcing air out of my lungs. Otherwise, as the forced inhale of air began, my voice faded like the volume being turned down on a radio.
After two or three minutes, the therapist turned off the motor and undid the latches. I climbed out. My body took over breathing on its own again.
According to Anna Ambrose, a former director of Respiratory Care at VUMC, no iron lungs were used on patients at VUMC since her arrival in 1980. The only iron lung that she knew of at VUMC was in storage — that would have been the one I was in — and it has long since been discarded.
Which means that of the hundreds or maybe thousands of patients who had spent time in an iron lung at VUMC, that afternoon in an unmarked storage room in Medical Center North, I was the last.
Not a word about any of this appeared in the story I was working on at the time. I can’t remember if I decided it didn’t fit the tone of the piece or maybe an editor cut it for space — but all this intrepid reporting didn’t see the light of day. Until now.
To read the story, “Polio patients, iron lung respirators, and…hey, is that Pat Boone?!” click here.
Photo credit: iStock. This is not the iron lung from VUMC; this model is on display at the Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama.
