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NORT CAROLINA -An American woman spent 61 years of her life living in an iron tube that breathed for her after polio left her paralysed.  Martha Mason lay immobile in the tube  - dubbed the iron lung - that worked as a type of ventilator, increasing and decreasing the air pressure to expand and contract her lungs because her own muscles were too weak.  She lay horizontal the 7-foot-long, 800-pound iron cylinder that encased all but her head.  Ms Mason had had become paralysed at just 11 years old after suffering polio – very shortly after the disease had killed her brother Gaston, Oddity Central reports.  After her brother had been buried, it is said that she realised that she too had the symptoms but kept her fears to herself to avoid upsetting her parents.