Paul Alexander passed away in March of this year. He was 78 and lived most of his life with an iron lung, one of the last people in the world to have used a ventilator dating back to 1928.
Despite his unusual circumstances, he lived an incredibly full life and never accepted less.
“I’m not going to accept anyone’s limitations on my life. I won’t. My life is amazing.”
When Paul was just six years old, he ran into his home in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, and told his mother he wasn’t feeling well. Since his birth in 1946, Paul had been a normal, vibrant, and active child, but now it was clear something was wrong.
“Oh my God, my son, no,” Paul recalled his mother saying.
Following the doctor’s orders, he spent the next few days in bed recovering, but it was clear he wasn’t getting better; the boy had polio.
Less than a week after he began feeling ill, he couldn’t hold anything down, swallow, or breathe. His parents eventually took him to the hospital, where he joined many other children experiencing similar symptoms.
Before polio vaccines were available, thousands of people were paralyzed by the virus. Polio, an incredibly contagious infection, can spread even when an infected person is not showing symptoms.
Symptoms of polio include fatigue, fever, stiffness, muscle pain, and vomiting. In rarer cases, polio can also cause paralysis and death.
Paul was examined by a doctor and pronounced dead, but then another doctor examined him and gave him another chance at life.
The second doctor performed an emergency tracheostomy, and after surgery, Paul was placed inside an iron lung.
When he finally woke up, three days later, he found himself among several rows of children also enclosed in iron lungs.
“I didn’t know what had happened. I had all sorts of imaginings, like I’d died. I kept asking myself, ‘Is this death? Is this a coffin? Or have I gone somewhere unwelcome?’” the man told As It Happens host Carol Off in 2017.
Paul, due to the tracheotomy, was unable to speak, which made the whole event even more terrifying.
“I tried to move, but I couldn’t move. Not even a finger. I tried to touch something, but I couldn’t. It was quite strange.”
The machine, invented in the late 1920s, was the first to ventilate a human being. Initially called the “drinking respirator,” it was hermetically sealed from the neck down and creates negative pressure in the chamber, drawing air into the patient’s lungs. If it generates overpressure, air is forced back out of the lungs, and the patient exhales.
Paul spent 18 months inside the metal container recovering from the initial infection. And he wasn’t alone. The year Paul was infected with the virus, 1952, was a very dark year if you look at the statistics. In the United States alone, nearly 58,000 people, mostly children, contracted the virus. Sadly, 3,145 of them died.
“As far as I could see, rows and rows of iron lungs. Full of children,” he said, according to The Guardian.
While some may have given up their will to live, it only fueled Paul’s will.
He heard doctors say, “He’s going to die today” or “He shouldn’t be alive” every time they walked past him, and he wanted to prove them wrong.
And that’s exactly what he did!
In 1954 he was discharged from the hospital, but quickly discovered that his life was drastically different from before.
“People didn’t like me very much back then,” she said during a 2021 video interview. “I could tell they were uncomfortable with me.”
But with the help of a therapist named Mrs. Sullivan, who visited him twice a week, his life slowly began to improve. His therapist made a deal with him that if he could “breathe like a frog”—a technique in which you trap air in your mouth by flattening your tongue and opening your throat—without the iron lung for three minutes, she would get him a puppy.
It was hard work, but after a year Paul was able to spend more and more time outside the iron lung.
When he was 21, he became the first person to graduate from a Dallas high school—with honors!—without physically attending class. He then set his sights on college and, after several rejections, was accepted to Southern Methodist University.
“They said I was too crippled and unvaccinated,” he recalls. “After two years of tormenting them, they accepted me on two conditions. One, that I get vaccinated against polio, and two, that a fraternity would take care of me.”
He graduated from Southern Methodist University and then attended law school at the University of Texas at Austin and became a lawyer.
“And it was very good!”
Even after a long 30-year career in the courts, he continued to keep busy writing a book, which he wrote alone using a pen attached to a stick.
According to Gizmodo , Paul is believed to be one of the last people alive still living in a nearly obsolete machine. The 76-year-old is confined to his old iron lung 24/7 and has spent much of his life in a cell.
“I traveled with him, I put him in a truck and took him with me. I went to college with him, I lived in a dorm. That scared everyone,” he said.
Paul’s type of iron lung hasn’t been manufactured for half a century because ventilators are now much more advanced and sophisticated.
But this polio survivor prefers his metal chamber, even though new technology is available. The Dallas lawyer had to make a desperate YouTube announcement when his metal lung nearly ruptured seven years ago. Fortunately, abandoned machines are still available across the country, so spare parts are plentiful. Paul has also enlisted the help of enthusiasts who love to get up close and personal with old technology.
“The suit fits!! Join us this Friday at Maggiano’s North Park at 11:30 for World Polio Day. Our amazing speaker Paul… ” Posted by the Rotary Club of Park Cities on Wednesday, October 22, 2014
“Many people had polio and are dead. What did they do with the iron lung? I’ve found them in daycare centers. I’ve found them in garages. I’ve found them in junk stores. Not much, but enough to find replacement parts,” he says.
Paul, who has outlived his parents and older brother, is now working on a second book!
Paul said he’s been able to live such a full life because he “never gave up.”
Rotarians are still reeling from World Polio Day. ” If a man like Paul Alexander, with an iron lung, can get a law degree and practice law, we can end polio now. Anything is possible! ” posted by the Park Cities Rotary Club on Sunday, October 26, 2014.
“I wanted to achieve the things I was told I couldn’t achieve,” she said, “and achieve the dreams I had.”
Paul is definitely an inspiration. He thrived in life against all odds and has a courageous and compelling story that I hope everyone reading this will share.
Her determination proves that the only limits are those we set for ourselves. Share her story with all your friends and family to inspire others.
