With his recent passing, I would like to take some time to commemorate this amazing person. And he truly was an amazing person, having spent 70 years of his life living in an iron lung.
Paul Alexander was born January 30, 1946, in Dallas, Texas. At the age of six, during a major outbreak of polio in the early 1950s, he contracted the disease and was paralyzed, only able to move his head, neck, and mouth. Polio can also paralyze the muscles used for breathing, and in his case, the paralysis was extensive. Iron lungs were the standard treatment for severe polio at that time. An iron lung is a large chamber that encases most of the body, with changes in air pressure inducing the lungs to inflate and deflate, allowing for Paul to breathe. It was the primary treatment for severe polio cases for many years. Respirators were still under development and not widely available.
Paul spent eighteen months in the hospital. He was kept in a large room with other polio patients. Unable to communicate with the other kids, all he could do was watch children get brought in, die, and be taken out.
His parents, wanting to get him out of the hospital, rented a portable generator and a truck to bring him and his iron lung home. “The doctors told us Paul could not possibly live,” Doris Alexander, Paul’s mother, said in his autobiography. “There were a…
