Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Polio victim survives using a relic — iron lung
Made career as lawyer despite being paralyzed
DALLAS — The machine is what people see first. The submarinelike metal cylinder dominates the room, rhythmically humming and pulsating as it helps keep Paul Alexander alive.
It is simple but effective: A big tube, a motor, a moving arm. As the paralyzed Dallas lawyer lays inside, his head protrudes from a velvety, airtight closure at one end, propped on a pillow on a height-adjusted table.
Alexander has spent much of his life in a can, a childhood victim of a once-epidemic disease that leaves him at the mercy of a mechanical respirator.
At the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his bachelor’s and law degrees, students crowded his open dorm door and gawked. Later, clients visiting his home waited before they asked: What is that thing you’re in? Is it a sauna?
No, he would say. It’s an iron lung. I had polio as a kid.
No one makes iron lungs anymore. Barely a handful of people still use the hulking respirators, which apply negative pressure to enable breathing.
Alexander, 72, is among the few. The semi-retired bankruptcy lawyer has been using one since he was 6, his lungs and muscles ravaged by paralytic polio..
The disease destroys nerve cells in the spinal cord. It spread silently, explained Steve Cochi, senior adviser at the global immunization division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For every one person who contracted paralytic polio, another 200 might display few or no symptoms.
“It was a disease that terrorized a community,” Cochi said. Its most famous victim was President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Until 1955, when Jonas Salk developed the vaccine that would largely eradicate the disease , polio reached pandemic levels. The worst year was 1952, according to PolioToday.org, with nearly 58,000 reported cases causing 3,100 deaths.
That summer, on a hot and rainy day, Alexander was playing outside his Pleasant Grove home, when he suddenly felt like going back inside.
As he walked in, dripping and muddy, he said, he let the screen door slam — an act that would normally draw scolding from his mom, who was mopping the kitchen.
Instead, she saw him and her face froze. “Oh, my God,” he remembers her saying.
As young Paul’s polio set in, his back and neck stiffened, and pain shot through his limbs; by the next day, he said, he was hallucinating, with a high fever.
The family had kept Paul home after their doctor suggested he’d be better off recovering there than at a hospital. But when the boy had trouble breathing, it seemed he wouldn’t be among the lucky ones whose symptoms eventually passed.
He was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent a tracheotomy and woke up in a plastic, steam-filled tent. By then, he was already in an iron lung, with no idea what was happening.
Iron lungs haven’t been mass-produced for half a century, and insurance stopped covering Alexander’s repairs long ago. His chest muscles too damaged to use portable ventilators, he’s dependent on a nearly obsolete machine.
Alexander learned to memorize instead of taking notes. He graduated second in his class from W.W. Samuell High in 1967 — “The only reason I didn’t get first,” he said, “is because I couldn’t do the biology lab.”
Next came Southern Methodist University, where he got around with the help of volunteers from Alpha Phi Omega fraternity before transferring to UT, along with his iron lung. There, he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1978, then his law degree in 1984.
He spent his career practicing family law and helping people filing for bankruptcy fight off creditors.
Today, Cochi says, polio is nearly gone: Only eight cases, all thought to be connected, have been reported in 2018 in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But until it’s fully wiped out, he says, “this disease can come back with a vengeance.”