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SALT LAKE CITY — Paul Alexander, 78, who relied for decades on an iron lung to breathe after being paralyzed by polio when he was just 6 in 1952, died Monday in Dallas.
His brother Philip Alexander posted the news on social media.
Despite being confined to the huge yellow tube that breathed for him, he went off to college and became a lawyer who practiced for 30 years. He also wrote a memoir called "Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung," and had a significant following on TikTok.
Wrote his brother, "It was an honor to be part of someone's life who was as admired as he was. He touched and inspired millions of people and that is no exaggeration. If you YouTube him, you will see videos made of him in every continent. Friends would tell me all the time how they encountered other people who just brought Paul up in conversation."
Phillip Alexander described Paul as "just a brother ... same as yours ... loving, giving advice and scolding when necessary."
The New York Times reported that Alexander as a boy "taught himself to breathe for minutes and later hours at a time, but he had to use the machine every day of his life." He was among the last in the United States to rely on an iron lung, "which works by rhythmically changing air pressure in the chamber to force air in and out of the lungs."
Parade reported that Alexander was the last man living in an iron lung in the United States and is believed to have lived in one the longest, a record noted by Guinness World Records in 2023. A woman, Martha Lillard, is the last person still using one, the article said.
Innovation has made iron lungs pretty obsolete. There are now portable ventilators, for instance. The Times said Alexander's "chest muscles were too damaged to use any other machine." When one he'd relied on for years failed, he moved to the yellow one, which had been cobbled together by someone who liked to tinker.
"News that Alexander wasn't well surfaced back in February when his social media assistant revealed that he was rushed to the ER after he tested positive for COVID-19," the Miami Herald reported.
Multiple news reports said he'd returned home and was no longer positive for COVID-19, but an exact cause of death was not clear.
In a profile of the man by the Dallas Morning News in 2018, Marc Ramirez wrote: "Inside his canary-yellow machine in his Love Field-area home, Alexander's rigid body lies under a white sheet, fingernails long as talons and resting on his chest. He depends on a caregiver to help him eat, wash his face in the morning, brush his teeth and shave. He can be bathed, or his sheets adjusted, through portholes on the machine's sides."
He told CNN in 2022 that he was writing a second book. He wrote by using a pen that was attached to a plastic stick he could hold with his mouth and use to tap a keyboard.
How does one live with an iron lung, but physically go to college, write a book and do other things?
"Faith powers him onward," the Dallas article said. "And he credits his motivation to success to a spirit of defiance and, most of all, to his late parents, whom he describes as 'extraordinary souls. Magical.'"
Added Alexander, "They just loved me. They said, 'You can do anything.' And I believed it."
