IRON LUNG, IRON WILL

HIS life changed forever one summer day in 1952. Paul Alexander was six years old and cooling off in light rain outside his family home when his head and neck began to hurt.

- DENNIS CAVERNELIS

He ran inside and his mother gasped when she saw him.

“God, please, no,” she said. Paul’s face was flushed with fever and she went cold with fear.

“She knew right away I had polio,” Paul, who lived in Dallas, Texas, recalled.

The devastating disease was rampant in the US, affecting at least 60 000 people – most of them children – that year alone.

Polio causes flu-like symptoms and the virus can attack the spinal cord or brain, causing paralysis and sometimes death.

Paul deteriorated fast and his parents took him to hospital. When he woke up he was unable to talk or move.

“I thought I was dead,” he said. Doctors had performed a tracheotomy to clear his chest of mucous and put him in an iron lung – an enormous sealed metal tank that stimulates breathing by varying air pressure to compress and depress the chest.

The contraption would be his “home” for the next 72 years – seven decades in which he grabbed life by the horns, worked as a lawyer, wrote his memoir and became a TikTok star.

Paul (78) died recently after contracting Covid and will go down in history as the person to live in an iron lung the longest.

His doctors hadn’t expected him to survive more than a year or two – he was paralysed from the neck down and he couldn’t breathe on his own.

But Paul defied the odds and became a worldwide inspiration.

“Life was a combination of one adventure, miracle – call it whatever you want to call it – after another,” he said.