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ATLANTA --
For the first time in more than half a century, the Odell residence is quiet.
There are no squeaks and pops from the electric motor that powered an "iron lung" pumping air in and out of Dianne Odell's body.
A thunderstorm knocked out the power to her home Wednesday, shutting
off the massive metal machine that had helped her breathe for nearly 60
years.
It was about 3 a.m. when the electricity went out at Odell's home in
Jackson, a small Tennessee town about 90 miles northeast of Memphis. An
emergency generator did not start, and Odell died as her father and
brother-in-law took turns pumping the iron lung manually.
Dianne Odell, 61, was believed to be the nation's oldest survivor of
polio to have spent almost all of her life inside an iron lung.
She had been confined within the 7-foot-long, 750-pound machine ever
since she was paralyzed at the age of 3 by bulbospinal polio. That was
in 1950, just a few years before a polio vaccine was discovered.
