Texas man didn’t let an iron lung hold him back
DALLAS — Confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child, Paul Alexander managed to train himself to breathe on his own for part of the day, earned a law degree, wrote a book about his life, built a big following on social media and inspired people around the globe with his positive outlook.
Alexander died Monday at age 78 at a Dallas hospital, said Daniel Spinks, a longtime friend. He said Alexander had recently been hospitalized after being diagnosed with COVID-19, but he did not know the cause of death.
Alexander contracted polio in 1952, when he was 6. He became paralyzed from the neck down and began using an iron lung, a cylinder that encased his body as the air pressure in the chamber forced air into and out of his lungs. He had millions of views on his Tiktok account.
“He loved to laugh,” Spinks said. “He was just one of the bright stars of this world.”
In one of his “Conversations With Paul" posts on Tiktok, Alexander tells viewers that “being positive is a way of life for me” as his head rests on a pillow and the iron lung can be heard whirring in the background.
Gary Cox, who has been friends with Alexander since college, said his friend was always smiling.
“He was so friendly," Cox said. “He was always happy.”
A book Alexander wrote about his life, “Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung,” was published in 2020. Cox said the title comes from a promise Alexander’s nurse made him when he was a young boy: He’d get a dog if he could teach himself to breathe on his own for three minutes.
“That took a good maybe two years, three years before he was able to stay out for three minutes and then five minutes and then 10 minutes and then eventually he got the strength to learn to stay out all day,” said Cox. And, Alexander did get that puppy.
Polio was once one of the nation’s most feared diseases, with annual outbreaks causing thousands of cases of paralysis. The disease primarily affects children. Vaccines became available starting in 1955.