Meet One of the Last Surviving Men In an Iron Lung
“Every time I’d make a friend, they’d die.”
He has been in an archaic machine for decades. It’s his life. Though that reminds him of the horrors and grimes of the past, he can’t leave it.
Meet Paul Alexander, a 76-year-old polio survivor who is one of the last individuals to still use an iron lung.
Paul was only six when he contracted polio in July 1952. He was playing outside his house in the summer rain when he started to feel a little uneasy.
He went home and told his mother about it. When she looked into the feverish eyes of his son, she suspected he was infected with polio at first glance.
The horrors of the past—and Paul’s childhood
In just five days, Paul’s condition worsened so much that he was not able to walk, hold anything in his hands and not even swallow food or cough properly.
The family doctor had advised Paul’s mother to not take him to hospital as there were already many infected children. “Paul had a better chance of recovering at home,” the doctor said.
But in the end, they had to go to the hospital, as Paul’s condition was deteriorating with every passing day.
Paul was fighting for his life in the hospital. He had almost lost it when a doctor told his mother that they can’t do anything.
They left him on a gurney in the hallway, no one paying any attention.
He would have died had another doctor not decided to examine him again.
Three days later Paul wakes up, in a weird-looking machine. He wouldn’t have even dreamed that this huge capsule would stick to him for life.
Strangely, when his eyes roamed around the room, he could see nothing but many more children laying in iron lungs. Rows and rows of it as far as the eyes could see, he remembers.
The next year and a half was nothing but torture. He could not talk, heard the cries of other children in pain, and lay in his own waste. No one was there to take care of him, and many more children who lay there.
He tried to talk to them by making faces. But this also didn’t end well. “Every time I’d make a friend, they’d die,” he recalls.
The boy who lived
He recalls how he overheard doctors talk about him and say: “He’s going to die today,” and “he should not be alive.” It made him want to live.
Paul survived. But polio had permanently paralyzed his body. His lungs could not work on their own. For decades, he has relied on a machine called the Iron Lung to help him breathe.
An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator, a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person’s body, and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space, to stimulate breathing.
In other words, Paul has remained dependent on a machine for his breathing. Not for a day, or a month, or a year. But for decades.
“My breathing out of the iron lung is voluntary: I have to think about it, and work at it, so I get tired,” he tells Gizmodo
One incident Paul recalls from his childhood is that of his therapist, Mrs. Sullivan.
He had started to fear doctors and nurses because of their insincere behavior towards him. But his mom convinced him otherwise.
She assisted him in learning “frog breathing.” Through this, he could breathe without the iron lung. It was challenging for Paul.
Mrs. Sullivan promised Paul that she’d give him a puppy if he learned it. It took Paul one whole year to learn frog breathing for just 3 minutes.
Paul finally got a puppy, as promised. He named it Ginger.
He doesn’t think of himself as a cripple
Despite having countless hardships, he never let that overpower his dreams. He didn’t let them stop him from living a normal life.
He went to law school, passed the bar exam, and started his own practice. He wrote a book, his memoir, using only his mouth. Not only this, he draws and sketches using his mouth.
“I have never thought of myself as a cripple. […] I’m not limited. I’m crippled, at least in most people’s minds, but not mine.”
That’s not only a story, but a testament to willpower and optimism. We just need a small fraction of what he’s shown. It’s truly incredible.
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