Attorney who lived in iron lung from age six due to polio dies at 78: ‘God taught me to believe’

Paul Alexander, who was known as “the man in the iron lung,” has died at the age of 78 not long after contracting Covid-19.

Alexander had lived with the machine known as “the iron lung” since 1952 when he contracted polio at just six years old. Within days, the disease left him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe independently. The iron lung is a metal, horizontal cylinder that stimulates breathing in patients who are unable to use their respiratory muscles.

When he first woke up in the hospital, a young boy unable to move or speak due to a tracheotomy, he was likely terrified. He stayed in the hospital for 18 months.

“I was just a kid like everybody else,” he said in a video from Gizmodo. “I began to feel a little bit ill. When Mom saw my face, she knew. She put me immediately to bed. Over the next five days, I lost everything – couldn’t move, couldn’t walk. And finally, the last day, I couldn’t breathe. My diaphragm was gone, destroyed. My body muscles were gone, destroyed. Which left me in the iron lung for the rest of my life.”

The iron lung has since been replaced by ventilators, but Alexander chose to keep his iron lung, saying he was used to it.

Though he was not expected to survive for very long, Alexander lived in his iron lung for 72 years.

He told Catholic Online, “The early part was very, very scary, but I’m an Alexander. My parents taught me to have a lot of pride and self-respect, and God taught me to believe I could do anything I dreamed of – and I did. So instead of letting Polio break me or kill me, I fought hard. The more it would knock me down, the angrier I would get. That anger, I’ve often said, is what kept me alive.”

In fact, Alexander graduated from high school, went off to college at age 25, and earned three degrees. He became a lawyer, running his own practice. He was even able to teach himself how to breathe, allowing him short amounts of time outside of the iron lung.

“It was years and years and years before I developed another way of breathing,” he told Catholic Online. “It’s a task that requires a lot of energy. But I was challenged to do it, I did it, and it took me a year to get up to three minutes.

“What I do is I use my throat to gulp. I gulp in breaths and swallow them into my lungs.”

Alexander overcame challenges with the support of friends and family. When the power would go out, there were people willing to hand pump a generator to keep him alive. And when his iron lung would break, he found Brady Richards, a mechanic who had an old iron lung in his garage, and used parts from it to fix Alexander’s iron lung.

Alexander even traveled the world with his iron lung and wrote his autobiography, “Three Minutes for a Dog,” by using a rod to type out words on a keyboard. He said, “I never thought of myself as a cripple. That’s the word I choose to use because I think it covers the ground in most people’s perceptions.”

“I’m crippled in most people’s minds, except mine. I’m Paul Alexander, human being.”

Alexander spent his final days with his brother Philip, sharing pints of ice cream. Though he was hospitalized with Covid-19 in February, Alexander had been released but had trouble eating and drinking.

“It was an honor to be with him in his last moments,” said Philip. He called his brother “an incredible role model.”

“He was just a normal brother to me,” he added. “We fought, we played, we loved, we partied, we went to concerts together — he was just a normal brother, I never thought about it.”