From Polio to Resilience: The 77-Year-Old Man Who Defied the Odds
Paul Alexander, 77, has led a very different life than most people. For most of his life, he has lived in an iron lung, and he is one of the last people in the world still using the ventilator device dating back to 1928.
“Despite his unusual circumstances, he has led an incredibly full life and has never accepted anything less.”
“I am not going to accept anyone’s limitations on my life. I am not going to do it. My life is incredible.”
When Paul was just six years old, he ran into his family’s home in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, telling his mother he didn’t feel well. Since his birth in 1946, Paul had been a normal, lively, and active child, but now something was clearly wrong.
“Oh my God, not my son,” Paul recalled his mother saying.
By doctor’s orders, he spent the next few days in bed to recover, but the boy clearly had polio and he wasn’t getting better. Less than a week after he started feeling ill, he couldn’t hold anything, eat, swallow, or breathe.
His parents eventually rushed him to the hospital where he joined countless other children experiencing similar symptoms.
Before polio vaccines were available, more than 15,000 people were paralyzed by the virus, in the United States alone. Polio, an incredibly contagious infection, can spread even if an infected person shows no symptoms.
The symptoms of polio include fatigue, fever, stiffness, muscle pain, and vomiting. In rarer cases, polio can also cause paralysis and death.
And that’s exactly what he did!
In 1954, he was discharged from the hospital, but he soon found that his life had changed drastically.
“People didn’t like me as much back then,” he said during a video interview in 2021. “I felt they were uncomfortable around me.”
But with the help of a therapist, Mrs. Sullivan, who visited him twice a week, his life began to improve little by little. His therapist had agreed with him that if he could ‘frog breathe’, a technique where you hold air in your mouth by pressing your tongue flat and opening your throat, without the iron lung, and do that for three minutes, she would give him a puppy.
At the age of 21, he became the first person to graduate from a high school in Dallas without physically attending class, and he even graduated cum laude! He then set his sights on college and after several rejections, he was admitted to Southern Methodist University.
“They said I was too crippled and unvaccinated,” he recalls. “Bothering them for two years, they accepted me on two conditions. First that I take the polio vaccine, and second that a fraternity be responsible for me.”
He graduated from Southern Methodist University and then pursued a law degree at the University of Texas in Austin. He passed his education and became a lawyer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“And I was a darn good one!”
Even after a 30-year career in the courtroom, he stayed busy by writing a book, which he typed entirely himself with a pen on a stick.
According to Gizmodo, Paul is believed to be one of the last living people still living in the nearly obsolete machine. The 77-year-old spends around the clock confined to his old iron lung and has spent a large part of his life in a tin can.
“I’ve traveled with it – stuck it in a truck and taken it. I’ve taken it to college, I’ve lived in a dormitory. That scared everybody,” he said.
Paul’s type of iron lung hasn’t been made for half a century now as ventilators are much more advanced and sophisticated.
But the polio survivor prefers his metal chamber even though there is new technology available. However, the Dallas lawyer had to make a desperate YouTube announcement when the iron lung almost broke down seven years ago. Fortunately, there are still abandoned machines across the country, so there are plenty of spare parts. Paul has also had help from enthusiasts who like to see old technology preserved.
“A lot of people had polio and now they’re dead. What did they do with the iron lungs? I found them in barns. I found them in garages. I found them in junk shops. Not a lot, but enough to scrounge parts together,” he said.
Paul, who has survived both his parents and his older brother, is now working on a second book!
Paul said that he has been able to lead such a fulfilling life because he ‘never gave up.’
“I wanted to accomplish the things they told me I couldn’t accomplish,” he said, “and fulfill the dreams I dreamed.”
Polio has been effectively eradicated in the United States since 1979. However, occasional cases of polio still arise that continue to raise concerns.
