Paul Alexander- The Man Who Has Lived In A Machine For 65 Years
Imagine spending your day locked up inside a metal cage.
Did you smile?
While it is even hard to picture ourselves having to spend a single day inside a metal
box, there is a man who has been living this reality for the past 65 years!
It wasn’t as easy as lying down and let life happen, it is a story of courage and
perseverance.
A story that pains you, breaks you but then pulls you out of gloom and motivates you to
take every breath like you own it!
Meet Paul Alexander, the man who has spent most of his day locked inside a metal tube
for almost his whole life!
Why did he have to do it, why has life been so harsh on him?
As a young boy of 6 years, Paul contracted polio.
You have heard about it, haven’t you?
Polio, a word for you, associated with some distant disease that you have no practical
exposure to.
It actually is an infectious viral disease that can cause muscle weakness and paralysis.
For most of us, our knowledge about this disease extends to only a vaccine we had to take as
a kid and crib about the missed playtime, if we even remember the ordeal.
Since the disease has been completely wiped out from the world except for a few cases
in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there is a good chance that you have never come across anyone
ailing from it.
But that doesn’t reduce the pain associated with polio!
So how did polio change the course of life for Paul?
The 71-year-old polio survivor, who lives in Dallas, has been using a massive mechanical
respirator called an iron lung for 65 years.
It resembles a metal tube that uses the negative form of pressure ventilation to allow a person
to breathe on their own in a normal manner.
So every day from 1952, Paul has been forced to climb into the machine and spend hours
on his back.
It helps him breathe by fastening tightly around his neck and creating a vacuum to draw
in oxygen.
Today he might be somewhat used to this “cage” but back in the day it wasn’t so.
When Paul Alexander first woke up in an iron lung at the age of six, he thought he was
dead.
He didn’t know what was happening and believed the iron box to be a coffin where he lay after
death!
He couldn't speak because he'd just had a tracheotomy.
When he tried to move, he couldn’t.
When he tried to touch the ventilator and figure out what it was, he couldn’t move
his finger as well!
It was an undesirable place, a strange one.
While most people would only need to use the machines for a week or two until they could
breathe on their own, for polio sufferers with permanent damage to their lungs, the
ventilator became an essential part of their existence.
So how has Paul’s journey been so far?
As per him, he saw the situation coupled with two possible routes of life.
Either he could adapt himself to the iron lung or make the cage adapt to his desires
and lifestyle.
While most people would choose the former and hide themselves into that metal tube,
away from prying eyes, Paul chose the latter!
He had traveled with it- put it in a truck and took it with him.
Imagine, he even went to Law College and took the ventilator to his dorm, freaking everybody
out in the process!
Paul explained, "I had a thousand friends before it was over with, who all wanted to
find out what's that guy downstairs with a head sticking out of a machine doing here".
From a struggling start to a confident life, this man has come a long way.
But did things always worked out for him?
Maybe not…
The manufacturing of iron lung was stopped in 1960s and thus the machine’s parts vanished
from the market by 2000s.
Since any machine would need maintenance and especially when it has been running for decades,
you can well imagine that the end of manufacturing would have put Paul in tough waters.
He had tried various other respirators during the years but felt that the lung was the most
natural way of breathing and was not ready to replace it.
Hence he came up with crafty ways to combat with this scary situation.
A lot of people suffering from this disease used the iron lung because it had become commonplace
during the 1950s when the disease broke out on a large scale.
Over the years, the users of these machines died and Paul found the machines dumped in
garages and junk shops from where he derived the parts to keep his ventilator working.
But these also began to wear out and Paul was left thinking.
A few years later he had no clue as to how was he supposed to fix it since there were
no mechanics who knew their way around the iron lung, which went almost obsolete decades
ago!
In 2015, a friend of Paul posted a video on YouTube explaining how the lawyer was dependent
on the iron lung which was giving up and he had nobody to fix this age old machine.
Eventually, Brady Richards, who runs the Environmental Testing Laboratory, a Texas-based firm which
tests equipment to ensure it meets environmental standards, got in touch.
He was able to fix Alexander’s iron lung with parts from a machine he found in his
own garage, yay!
It is amazing how Paul has controlled his dependence on the machine in the past decades.
In his words, "It was years and years and years before I developed another way of breathing.
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 it up to three minutes”.
While in the beginning he had to stay inside the machine for the entire day because he
couldn’t breathe without it at all, but now he spends the day outside it, going in
at night to sleep.
This gentleman is truly an inspiration!
Persistence is the key and the proof is the fact that Paul is writing his memoir, 3 Minutes
For A Dog, which will soon hit shelves.
The inspiration for it came from a recent resurgence of polio for which there is no
cure, just a vaccine.
Alexander has not put any advice in the book because he feels that people decide what they
want to do and hence he has just written facts about the disease.
The most amazing thing is that he has not hired someone to do the writing for him, rather
chooses to write it himself while lying down in the lung.
He holds a pen in his mouth to type on the keyboard himself.
Wow!
Paul has seen some really tough days when the government denied him care and he was
left by his attendants.
While these people may have thought him to be a burden, his life is an example of hope,
patience and perseverance.
Diseased or not, we can all learn a thing or two from his life.
What emotions does Paul Alexander’s story evoke in you?
Tell us in the comment section below.
Subscribe to our channel if you liked this video.
And while you're here, check out our other videos and tell us what you think of them.
You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Thanks for watching.