Famous people who were placed on ventilators

While deposed premier Nawaz Sharif's wife, Kulsoom Nawaz, is on a ventilator in a London clinic currently, there are many famous people in the modern history who were placed on such machines to send breathable air in and out of lungs to keep them alive.

A research shows that although there have been a few lucky celebrities who survived after being kept on ventilators, some unfortunate ones remained on artificial respiration for years, before being taken off and pronounced dead.

World-famous physicist, Dr Stephen Hawkins, had Motor Neuron Disease which he was first diagnosed with at the young age of 21 when he was still at a university. He remained on a ventilator for 55 years till his death at the age of 76 in 2018.

The disease gradually paralysed him over decades until in 1984 he developed pneumonia. In a rare public appearance in 2013, Stephen Hawking had offered a glimpse of what it was like to live with Motor Neurone disease, saying he had needed assistance with breathing since having a ‘Tracheostomy’ in 1985.

Tracheostomy is an operative procedure that creates a surgical airway in the cervical trachea, commonly called the windpipe.

"Being on a ventilator has not curbed my lifestyle," Hawking said in an interview, before listing some of the places he had visited in the intervening years.

In 1995, after an accident had left him paralysed, famous American actor, Christopher Reeve, had to use a wheelchair and a portable ventilator for the rest of his life till he breathed his last in 2004 at the age of 52.

Reeve remained on the ventilator for nine years, during which he directed a movie and served on the board of numerous charities.

Christopher Reeve was known for his super-hit film Superman’. There are four Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. Famous American actress Elizabeth Taylor had spent a life in and out of hospitals.

From the day 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor fell off a horse and hurt her back, medical problems hounded her like paparazzi, sending her to hospitals for more than 20 major operations and countless treatments.

According to March 23, 2011 report of the ‘San Diego Union Tribune’, she suffered from pneumonia in April 1990 and for several days was hooked up to a ventilator to aid her breathing.

A lot earlier in 1961, she had toured Europe, awaiting production of her blockbuster ‘Cleopatra’. There, she developed a case of pneumonia, which led to an emergency tracheotomy and worldwide talk of her impending death.

The swelling of sympathy was widely thought to have influenced Academy voters, who awarded Taylor her first Best Actress Oscar — for her performance in a film she loathed. Elizabeth later commented, "Any of my three previous nominations were more deserving. I knew it was a sympathy award, but I was still proud to get it."

Meanwhile, Taylor's competitor Shirley MacLaine memorably quipped, "I lost to a tracheotomy!"

Former Pakistani premier, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi's brother, Zahid Khaqan, had gone into coma with head injuries after a missile shrapnel had pierced his skull in April 10, 1988 Ojhri Camp disaster, which had rocked Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

His father and the-then federal minister for production, Khaqan Abbasi, who was seated next to his son in the car, had lost his life in that incident.

Zahid Abbasi died in 2005 after remaining on artificial respiration for 17 painful years, both for him and the family. And here comes a shocking revelation, as reported in the October 9, 2013 edition of British media house ‘Mail Online’.

An American woman, Martha Mason, spent 61 years of her life living in an iron tube that breathed for her after polio left her paralysed.

The Mail Online had reported: "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 in the 7-foot-long, 800-pound iron cylinder that encased all but her head."