This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

In 1950, a three-year-old girl from Tennessee contracted polio.

Within days, Diane O'Dell 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 and capsulated

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 say, I'd rather be dead.

I couldn't live that way.

I'd rather be dead.

Nobody would rather be dead.

They think at the spur of the 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.

...