From NPR, this is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In 1950, a three year old girl from Tennessee contracted polio.
Within days, Diane Odell couldn't walk.
Then she couldn't breathe.
Her life was saved by a miraculous, monstrous device, the iron lung.
You are listening to the breath of life as it is pumped by these tank respirators, called iron lungs.
Over the years, new types of respirators allowed many polio patients to escape the iron lung.
Not Diane.
She had a spinal condition that made it her only option.
So she stayed flat on her back, encapsulated from the neck down in the long, noisy, cylindrical tube, for 58 years.
In an interview shortly before her death, Diane said people often had the same blunt reaction about what they would want in her situation.
Most of them said, I'd rather be dead.
I couldn't live that way.
I'd rather be dead.
Nobody would rather be dead.
They think it's the spur of moment, but there's always tomorrow.
There is always tomorrow.
Diane saw her choice very differently than the people looking in from the outside.
It's one thing to say you would not want to live for 58 years in an iron lung, but that is not the choice that confronted Diane.