Dianne Odell, thank you for your inspiration.

On the 13th of February 1947, in Tennessee, Dianne Odell was born. Unfortunately, she was struck by polio at the age of three. Worse, it was the most crippling type of polio, bulbo-spinal polio which not only paralysed her whole body, it caused a deformity in her spine.

There was a time, during the 1940s and 1950s when polio was common among children and there was no cure. So, children were then told not to drink water from suspicious sources such as public fountains, to avoid swimming pools and crowded places such as theatres.

However, it was discovered that children who played in polio-laden dirty places recovered from polio after what seemed like a bout of flu, apparently immune to the disease while children in clean places were more susceptible to polio.

There was a year when more than 50,000 cases were reported with more than three thousand dead due to paralysis of the respiratory muscles. Some twenty thousand cases resulted in cripples with nerves destroyed and muscles and bones affected.

Polio starts with some kind of fatigue, a stiff neck, headache, fever and weakened legs.

Fortunately for many, a vaccine for polio was available at the end of the 1950s.

For Dianne Odell, the vaccine came too late. So did a portable respiratory machine as she was unable to benefit from it due to her deformed spine. As a result, she had to spend fifty-eight years in a seven foot, seven hundred and fifty pound breathing machine. To this day, there are still people who use such a machine known as the iron lung. Till the age of twenty, she could still come out of that machine for a short while. In fact, she came out of it to have herself baptised at the age of thirteen. After the age of twenty, she had to be in her iron lung twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In spite of her polio, her having to live in a machine with a electric pump to regulate the pressure of her chest for the remainder of her life, till the age of sixty-one when an electrical blackout and an inability of the relatives to start a back-up generator took away her life, she showed other humans what could still be accomplished despite her handicap.

Despite her having to spend her life in the iron lung, she did complete her studies with the help of her classmates and teachers who brought assignments from school for her to answer, again with the help of friends and family members as well as a Dictaphone. Fantastic as it may sound, she wrote with her toes. Through such everyday heroes and her own determination, she graduated from her high school at the age of eighteen. She took courses at the University of Tennessee and studied psychology through long-distance classes from Freed-Hardeman University. However, she had to stop her study as she suffered from migraine headaches. Nevertheless, she was awarded an honorary degree.

To motivate children, especially those with disabilities, she wrote a book titled Blinky, Less Light which took her ten long years to write using a voice activated computer and sold almost one hundred thousand copies. Imagine that! Ten long years! What an effort! What determination! A lesser person would have given up in despair of ever completing it. How great her determination was can only be known when understand that the pace was slow and painful with hospital visits and surgeries she had to endure. And what an honourable goal! She did not stop there. She was even writing her own autobiography when the electrical blackout stopped her. For her, sixty-one years just was not enough! What a woman!

And we must not forget the wonderful people we have in this world. Her parents took it upon themselves to ensure that she would live and accomplish what she did. Her relatives, friends, students and teachers of her school as well as the contributors of donations for her welfare showed that there is a sea of people who care. These are people with hearts of gold who are given the opportunity to show themselves in such trying times.

Actually, amidst the turmoil and the savagery that greet us each day as we turn the pages of our newspapers, is a wonderful world filled with beautiful people.

Dianne Odell is certainly an inspiration to all who face challenges in their lives. Despite the odds against her, she went through life, improving herself in ways possible to her and emerged thankful of the love and goodness the people around her had bestowed by reaching out to give children the inspiration to improve themselves. She gave so much of herself despite coming into the world with so much less than the average child.

The world lost a truly beautiful woman on the 28th of May, 2008. Physically, she may be gone but she will always remain in our hearts.