IT BEGAN WITH A HEADACHE
Kansas City polio survivor is one of last iron-lung users in U.S.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — While waiting for a bus to take her home from work, Mona Randolph’s head felt like it was going to split open. She had a fever, chills. The sights and sounds of the world intensified. Her nerves were on edge. She was 20 years old, three days into a new job and three months away from getting married.
It was 1956. A year before, the government had approved a vaccine for polio, but children were the priority recipients. As an adult, Mona was thought to have been at little risk.
Today, she has limited use of her right arm, though the fine motor skills needs to feed herself or write letters have left her in recent years. She hasn’t had the use of her left arm for more than 60 years. She gets around in a wheelchair.
Before she got sick, she loved playing the piano. Sheet music stored in the piano bench was often her first stop when visiting friends’ homes. Sometimes she still feels Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in her fingertips.
When she describes her initial symptoms in 1956, she even discusses it in musical terms.
“Everything was off-key,” she said. “I couldn’t stand to hear people talking in the kitchen. They’d whisper and it would hurt my ears. I couldn’t stand any light. Mom put blankets over the windows.”
After her bus trip home that day, she weakened more and more over the next several hours. On the second or third day, she couldn’t breathe. Doctors immediately put her in an iron lung.
“They happened to have one in the basement because people were not using them much then,” she said.
For many years, she was able to live without the iron lung. Mona compares the paralysis to being trapped in the body of a newborn — except a baby can at least flail its arms and kick its legs. Becoming so dependent on others was a blow to an independent young woman in the prime of her life.
After her initial hospitalization, she received treatment at Warm Springs, Ark., the same facilities that treated President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When fellow patients gained more muscle use than she did, she was discouraged and depressed. Some were left behind.
Over time, and with the unwavering support of family and friends, she was able to regain some semblance of an independent life.
In the 1980s, post-polio syndrome worsened her condition to the point that she had to go back to the iron lung at night. She describes breathing — something most of us don’t give a second thought — as an effort of concentration, like lifting weights.
Six nights a week, Mona Randolph sleeps up to her neck in a long, noisy, airtight, 75-year-old iron tube — one of only three “iron lungs” known to still be in use in the U.S. It’s a 6-footlong immersive breathing apparatus that looks something like an industrial oven or, as Randolph calls it, her “yellow submarine.”
During the day, she uses a modern respirator — a CPAP machine — but those supposed improvements in technology have their own problems. For one, they force air into her lungs. Hardly a comfortable feeling. And, though she and husband Mark Randolph own three of the contraptions, one’s almost always on the fritz.
The iron lung, on the other hand, creates a negative pressure inside that allows Mona’s chest to expand and contract more naturally.
Getting into the machine every night takes more than an hour. It requires assistance from Mark, plus at least one friend, volunteer or hired hand.
Someone has to help Mona dress for bed. Someone has to get her into the sling that hoists her from her bed and swings her across the ceiling of her Waldo home and over to the 700-pound machine.
Someone has to cover her with blankets for warmth, adjust her arms and head and legs so she’s comfortable — a wrist resting on a pajama button in the wrong place can cause a fitful night’s sleep. Then someone has to tighten the seal around Randolph’s neck and turn on the half-horsepower machine that powers the thing, as it chug-chug-chugs all through the night like a slowidling lawn mower.
In the morning, someone has to repeat the process in reverse after she wakes up.
This has been her routine for about 36 years.
Despite all this effort, she has one word for being sealed up in the machine for the night: “Relief.”
She won’t say much of her intended fiance from when she was younger, only that he “drifted away.” Mark and Mona met at a church dinner more than 30 years ago, and they may have discovered the secret to complete marital harmony.
“She gets the thermostat,” Mark said. “I get the remote control.”
In the movie of their lives, their “meet cute” moment came in the 1980s, when she was a sort of house mother for young women at their church and he was new in town. The women hosted dinners Friday nights for the young men who attended church.
Free spaghetti and the company of the opposite sex; it’s easy to see the appeal for a young bachelor.
Before each meal, the weekly tradition was to hold hands and say grace. Without thinking about it, Mark reached over with his right hand and did something few had done before: He grabbed her paralyzed left hand.
As Mark told the story, Mona smiled while breathing through her forced-air respirator.
With a gleam in his eyes, Mark said, “She noticed.”