Martha Winum's Incredible 62-Year Assignment

Sister Martha Winum has held the title of chaplain at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson for 34 years, and that's only the second half of her career thereSoon the rotunda that housed the chapel and served as the center of life at St. Charles Hospital and Rehabilitation Center had 12 iron lungs. After a few minutes, you're exhausted." SHE remembers when St. Up, down, up, down. So much is going or gone. It takes some explaining. It started to seem like a magician's trunk. "Here," she said at the crank, "this is how you pump in the air. Now, as old wings of the hospital are about to be razed to make way for an expansion, no one knows where the remaining iron lung will end up. "You won't get rid of it, I hope," she said to Barry T. Sister was 40 years away. "This here is for the bedpans," she said, working her way down the capsule. Zeman, the hospital C.E.O., during a stop on her tour. What helped save lives during wave after wave of the polio epidemic looks like a space capsule with a window at the head, rubber portholes on the sides, a crank at the feet. Sister Martha will explain it all. "These sunmote portholes were used for massaging the patient's arms," she said, sticking her arms in and kneading the air. Among the highlights of Sister Martha Winum's tour is the iron lung parked in a hallway near Rehabilitation. Physical therapists and nurses striding down the hall had stopped in their tracks to watch. Charles will come down. "Naturally, I have mixed emotions," Sister Martha Winum said.