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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 few times when the electrical power failed and then the lung had to be pumped by hand. Our neighbors would run over and help us pump it.”
As time went on, he learned to breathe and speak. Beginning in 1954, with help from a physical therapist, Alexander spent a year learning glossopharyngeal breathing, which allowed him to leave the iron lung for brief periods of time.
Maybe because he was only six at the time, or more likely there was something about his personality that prevented him from wallowing is despair, like I know I would. Despite his condition, Alexander graduated from college. The college at first refused to admit him. But because of his perseverance, they gave in, and he received a degree. Then he attended The University of Texas at Austin, eventually earning a law degree and ran his own legal practice. He also wrote the book “Three Minutes for a Dog,” in 2020 detailing his life.
